AAU basketball programs growing steadily in Canada
Where there is elite high-school level basketball, AAU is involved, and that’s true in Canada, too.
Leo Rautins, 55, is a walking Wikipedia of Canadian basketball history. Ask him a question, and he asks if it’s OK to digress and fill in background before giving the answer. It’s necessary to understand then to comprehend now, he said.
He called Jack Donohue, the late Canadian national team coach who coached Lew Alcindor at New York’s Power Memorial, the “single most important person and had the biggest impact on basketball in this country. He was always fighting an uphill battle, dealing with politics and lack of resources.”
He reminds you that Canada basketball finished fourth at the 1976 and 1984 Olympics.
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Rautins grew up in Toronto with the only driveway hoop in his extended neighborhood. How rare were hoops in driveways? “If you could find one, I would give you a hundred bucks,” he said.
Rautins played for Minnesota and Syracuse, the national team, 32 games in the NBA and several pro teams in Europe. He also coached the national team 2005-2011, and he’s now the Raptors’ TV analyst.
He has been involved at multiple levels and has had an up-close look. He declines to take any credit. But he went into communities, talked with alienated AAU folks, conducted clinics and sent a message.
“I wanted every kid to know: it’s open for everybody,” Rautins said. “If you’re good enough, you’re going to play.”
In the Greater Toronto Area, there are two premier programs – Grassroots Elite AAU run by Ro Russell and CIA Bounce led by Tony McIntyre, the father of Milwaukee Bucks guard Tyler Ennis.
Rautins’ son, Sam, plays for CIA Bounce.
“If you go to some of top AAU programs here, the coaching is solid,” Rautins said. “The practice and playing component is good. They work on their games. It’s been a huge part of this development. They just don’t roll out the ball.”
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To varying degrees, both programs have a relationships with Nike and their teams play in high-level tournaments throughout North America.
“When these kids started to compete with U.S. kids on the AAU circuit, people started to take notice,” McIntyre said. “People are seeing that Canadian kids are major contributors.”
Now, Canada wants to sustain this level and not have a dropoff, perhaps as Argentina did. Argentina won gold at the Athens Olympics in 2004, bronze at the China Olympics in 2008 but finished fourth at the 2012 Olympics. Argentina hasn’t medaled at the FIBA World Cup since 2002 and lost to Venezuela at the 2015 FIBA Americas championship and was 10th at the 2015 FIBA under-19 championship.
“That’s what we’ve got to guard against, and the way to do that is to continue to work at grassroots and early identification program,” said Wayne Parrish, the CEO of Canada Basketball from 2007 to 2015. “Arguably the most important program that we have right now is called the Target Athlete Strategy.
“Our high performance men’s side and women’s side are ID’ing kids as young as 11 or 12 maybe as young as 10. It’s targeting those athletes and working with those athletes and their families from a very young age to maximize their potential and opportunity.”
There is hope and promise of better basketball to come in Canada – from Masai Ujiri predicting a Raptors championship someday to an Olympic medal for Canada’s men’s team.
In late 1990s, Rautins looked out a window at the Greater Toronto landscape from a descending airplane.
“I said to myself, ‘Wow, there’s a driveway that has a hoop in it. There’s another driveway. Another one. Are you kidding me? This is Toronto,’ ” Rautins said. “It hit. There’s something happening.”