Play Their Hearts Out: A Coach, His Star Recruit, And The Youth Basketball Machine (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
As a parent of two elite basketball players in Southern California, I found this book to be a pretty accurate depiction of the perilous and highly competitive field of AAU basketball. I'd always been an athlete in high school and college, but it was not until my son bloomed into a 6'6 1/2 giant did I see the inner workings that take a player from the mundanity of Varsity sports to emotionally charged excitement of Elite Varsity sports. Every day is a challenge, and Play Their Hearts out logs each of those days in painful detail. Demetrius Walker is not the typical AAU kid: almost all of the kids have one solid, omnipresent parent to help them navigate. Still, his story is a cautionary tale for everyone entering elite sports in general, and boys' basketball in particular because Dohrmann's account is truly one of accuracy. The characterization of the coaches, with many being vampires waiting to suck whatever glory they can get out of families, is absolutely true. There are many earnest trainers and coaches, but it's like walking through a defunct field of land mines: how can you tell what's dangerous until you step on it and it blows up? The way to know is to read Play Their Hearts Out. It's a cheat sheet for the signs to look for as kids navigate the dangers of AAU basketball. Listening to someone who doesn't have your child's BEST interest in mind really could cause your son or daughter to be lost, never to recover from one misstep. That's not hyperbole. With one senior son and one sophomore son, I am witnessing stunningly talented boys falling off week by week because of advice made from avarice, and not concern. I've learned from experience, but Dohrmann's tone feels like a good friend telling you a story to warn you from making what could be the biggest mistake of your child's life. This felt like a guilty pleasure, not that it was poorly written but because the author unabashedly slams the sleazy types that dominate the grassroots (AAU) basketball scene. About the only awful things we don't read about is how the bad guys drown kittens and kick orphans. The author seemed to me to be less than objective in the way he portrayed the evilness (the bad guys were only bad, for the most part) and virtuosity (some were positively saint-like) of the adults but that didn't detract too much from the story.Joe Keller is the kind of guy who makes you want to vomit and he's a major character in the book. I laughed out loud when I read in the acknowledgments that "[Joe Keller] won't be pleased with everything I have written..." Holy crap, I can't imagine a single thing he'd be okay with unless he likes being portrayed as a heartless, lying, using, money grubbing cretin. The book offers no redeeming qualities about the guy but it's probably not a stretch to believe he has none.Pat Barrett gets flamed badly too but not as frequently. It's clear that Barrett provided no access to the author so I suspect he fared a little better because there was less to report.Sonny Vaccaro somehow comes across as a good guy but I think that's because he cooperated with the author. (Keller cooperated too, at least early on, but his awfulness was so monumental it was the central theme of the book.)I'm not familiar with the AAU scene but it seemed to me that the author provided lots of meaningful insights.
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