Stern: New ball is staying
David Stern expected complaints, and he got plenty of them.
His response: The new ball is staying.

The NBA commissioner said Monday the league is sticking with its new ball and is convinced it's a better product despite concerns
from a number of players.

That was a much stronger answer than he gave recently when he
was in Europe for a series of exhibition games between NBA and
international teams. Stern said then he would continue to monitor
the situation and test the ball some more. That seemed to leave
open the possibility the new ball would be bounced.

"We've been testing it and retesting it," Stern said. "And I
think that some of the dramatics around it were a little overstated
in terms of the downside and not enough recognition of the
upside."

The upside to Stern is that all the new balls, made of a
microfiber composite, feel exactly alike. No two leather balls were
the same. Stern said it was customary for referees to go through a
rack of balls to select the best one before each game.

Still, some players preferred it that way. Some have said the
new ball is too sticky when it's dry; others claim it's too
slippery when wet.

Shaquille O'Neal and Steve Nash are among those wary. O'Neal has
said the new ball "feels like one of those cheap balls that you
buy at the toy store -- indoor-outdoor balls."

"Within certain parameters of the way you want a ball to
perform again and again and again, it is performing extraordinarily
well," Stern said. "It doesn't mean it feels the same; it may not
even bounce exactly the same. It may do all the things that
everyone says it may or may not do, but it's a very good ball and
the tests continue to demonstrate that it's an improvement."

Stern was speaking at the NBA Store, where the league announced
a partnership with the personal computer company Lenovo. But once
that was done, it was back to what has been perhaps the biggest
headache the commissioner has faced this preseason.

NBA officials have stressed that most players grew up playing
with the microfiber composite, but they may have underestimated the
preference players have for leather. That's even after Stern said
Spalding wanted to make the change more than a year ago.

"We said no," Stern said. "We want to go back and do more
tests and confirm to us that this move will be pain free -- which,
of course, it hasn't been."

Stern said he has handled the new ball and doesn't agree with
the complaints that it bounces differently from the old one.

"It may behave somewhat differently in some circumstance or
another ... but I will say that whichever ball you take out of the
box, it's going to behave in that way consistently," he said.
"Every leather ball behaves differently."

"That's the trade-off we're making," he added. "And we think
it's going to make a great improvement."

Let's train our coaches

From story.scout.com


While various organizations that oversee basketball in the U.S. ponder this country's decline on the international stage, they are overlooking a very key component in the game's development.

When did they put the old Reagan Administration in charge of basketball in the U.S.? Most of the proposed solutions to our country's recent hoops crisis appear to be coming straight out of the trickle-down handbook.

Adidas says it is getting out of the sneaker-sponsored exposure camps; Nike says it may follow suit (and sort of already is, on the girl's side, at least, with a conversion to the Skills Academy). Reebok (OK, Sonny Vaccaro) is hawking the idea of a national academy that would train a committee-selected 40 top prospects (this is a boy's proposal, of course). Others are advocating a shift of the college recruiting process from summer play back to the high schools.

Elitist, elitist and, well, that third idea isn't exactly elitist, but it's still trickle down.

After decades of neglect, the powers that be in basketball are trying to address the problem of developing our nation's basketball players. And most of the solutions on the board are the equivalent of trying to chip down a glacier with an ice pick. It's the good, old American way - throw money at a small group comprising the already prosperous and successful, enjoy some short-term but high-profile gains and hope some a few crumb fall to the peasants.

Before anyone dismisses this as some socialist rant, consider that this is sports that we're addressing. Also consider that the provocation of the basketball summit convened this week in Indianapolis by, in essence, NBA commissioner David Stern and NCAA president Myles Brand was, also in essence, the utter failure of the U.S. at the international level this past summer. There also is some concern that young athletes (until Candace Parker leaves college early, this again is purely a male problem) are socially and academically unprepared for upper levels of competition (eg., 20-year-old multimillionaires who don't realize that making long-distance calls on the hotel phone is a lot more expensive than doing so on their national-plan cell phones).

The core problem is that, dang it, we ain't winning everything anymore.

So let's figure out a way to start winning again, and everything will be all right.

A parent recently asked on a message board if a seventh-grade daughter's team was spending too much time on teaching plays. Most respondents agreed that, at that age, it was far more important for players to learn how to play basketball than it was to learn plays. One coach agreed, but rationalized spending some time on plays by pointing out the championships the team won for doing so.

In other words, the wins justify the means.

We disagree. In fact, we maintain that the American emphasis on winning has greatly eroded our ability to do so. We further maintain that the value placed on winning is one of the greatest trickle-down triumphs of all time. Now it is pretty commonplace to see sixth-grade teams playing in front of maniacally screaming parents, upset at the coach that their team isn't winning. What happened to is Suzy having fun and is she getting better as a player? Having fun and getting better may indeed lead to winning, but sometimes not quickly enough for our instant-gratification society.

So, as a society, we're inclined to put the cart ahead, outfitting it with a jet engine, and never mind that we're killing the horse in the process.

To which we say bottom's up. A lot of groups call themselves "grassroots," but maintain all the trappings of elitist. The "grassroots" organizations aren't advocating this, but let's say if I have this right - for the past couple of decades, we've had coaches from Europe and Australia picking the brains of the best coaches in the U.S. They've all gone home and passed on that wisdom to other coaches. And now, their players are the ones kicking our butts, Spain winning the FIBA World Championship for men and the Aussies taking the women's title.

A friend and columnist of ours, Ernie Woods, the winningest coach in the history of Washington state community college basketball, has been overseeing a training program for coaches in China. Think the Chinese, with all their human resources, aren't in, say, another 10 years aren't going to join the growing list of countries kicking our butts?

Some of our sports have closer to the right idea. Soccer requires training and certification of youth coaches. The best youth coaches even are paid salaries. And the U.S. remains powerful in that sport.

Forget a national academy for elite players. What about a comprehensive training program for coaches that includes background checks and certification? Right now, anyone with a whistle and a floor can start a club team and begin influencing the futures of our children. While we don't exactly treat our teachers very well, we at least require that they get a college education before we start underpaying them.

We're not knocking what the likes of Nike is doing with the Skills Academy for Girl's. It's one of our favorite events to attend and it does a lot of good work. There, Nancy Lieberman reminded its participants to maintain a link to the history of the women's game. Good advice. We'd prefer the governing bodies, such as USA Basketball, to pay more attention to who is teaching our players than to the players themselves - and just a handful at that. We'd guess that teaching fundamentals to sixth graders, when they're still open books, might be far more effective than trying to do the same with college players who already have become creatures of bad habits.

Focusing more on our coaches, especially those at the younger levels, will require that the power brokers put aside their special interests, in which winning is tightly intertwined with economic factors. Of course the NCAA favors an academy, which may mean that fewer of its stars bolt early for the pros. Of course the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) applauds the deemphasis of summer camps by Nike and adidas, because it means their increasingly irrelevant national championships gain more currency and they can rake in more money selling insurance that almost nobody ever uses.

For a fraction of the cost of operating a basketball academy for a year, you probably could put, say, Bob Kloppenburg, Nancy Lieberman and Tex Winter on salary or stipend, give them a travel budget and conduct a series of free three-day coaching clinics across the country. For a fraction of that cost, you probably could produce a pretty effective training DVD, make several hundred thousand copies and make it mandatory viewing for any coach that will enter an NCAA-sanctioned event. Let' s ask Tara VanDerveer and other top U.S. women's coaches to develop the cirriculum that will develop our next generation of coaches.

We realize that Val Ackerman, the former WNBA president, was part of the recent hoops summit, representing USA Basketbal, but can any future endeavors please take more fully into account the female side of the game? The economic factors there are even more of a challenge there. So are the safety issues. We're starting to see the same signs in the girl's game, for example, that learning to shoot is becoming less and less a priority.

And last we looked, that was the U.S. women getting the beegeebers kicked out of them by the Russians during the semifinals of the world championships.

Losing can be a prompt for introspection and action, as long as winning, at least in the short term, does not become a priority of any solutions.