Play Their Hearts Out

This inside look at Amateur Athletic Union basketball--a rarely scrutinized hoops farm ground--examines a sordid world of overly ambitious coaches banking their lives on the futures of preteen players. Many of the coaches seem motivated by shoe contracts while dreaming of a bigger payday down the road. Each day for AAU basketball coaches is a gaze at a proverbial crystal ball as they try to predict which young players will evolve into NBA draft picks. Emily Speer's poor pacing and numerous mispronunciations of well-known basketball figures mar this book. She also cannot conjure an angry voice--even for the hot-under-the-collar coach who is the book's focus. M.B. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Starred review from July 26, 2010
Dohrmann, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for Sports Illustrated, spent eight years chronicling the struggles and triumphs of a select group of California youths who chased their dream in his wonderful and immaculately reported first book. Dohrmann largely focuses his work on Demetrius Walker, the hoops phenom who seems destined for stardom at a young age, his travel team from California, and the club's complex and bombastic coach, Joe Keller. Dohrmann began reporting on the book back in 2000, when Walker and many of his teammates were only 10 years old, and followed them through to their high school graduation. Along the way, he shows the brutal nature of "grassroots" basketball, in which coaches can view their players as "investments," the power of sneaker companies in youth basketball, and the cutthroat antics of collegiate recruiting. But this is equally a story about relationships and the sad deterioration of many of them, whether it be among teammates, parents and son, or coach and player. It's a brilliant and heart-wrenching journey, and a cautionary tale to any basketball player who thinks the path to the NBA is a slam dunk.