Just shoe it

Sneaker manufacturers leave a deep imprint on summer basketball scene, and some coaches worry that their clout clouds the judgement of college prospects

By STEVE WISEMAN
Staff Writer, The State, Columbia, SC

If it’s summer, Mike Jones must be jet-setting around the country on Nike CEO Phil Knight’s dime.

Because Jones is 6-foot-6, 230 pounds and possesses basketball abilities college coaches crave, the Lower Richland High star has played in tournaments from New Orleans to Hampton, Va., to Indianapolis the past two years.

This week he played close to home, in North Augusta at the Peach Jam Tournament.

That it didn’t require an airplane ride to play wasn’t what attracted Jones and the South Carolina Ravens AAU team to the event. That Nike sponsored it was all that mattered.

Nike, adidas and Reebok, the big three in basketball shoe and apparel sales, jockey for position by outfitting the nation’s top players through sponsorships of AAU and high school teams, all in an effort to land the next big superstar.

Some South Carolina coaches say shoe companies are taking advantage of young players and are indirectly affecting youngsters’ futures by using them as human billboards. That opinion, however, isn’t shared by the majority in a state where budget cuts to education are the norm.

But for Jones, and players like him, it’s all about getting national exposure.

Even before he started his junior year of high school, Jones was well versed in how the summer basketball circuit works. Even if he wanted to travel to Teaneck, N.J., for last week’s adidas ABCD Camp, he knew he couldn’t. It was off limits.

It would be as absurd as if he wanted to slip on a pair of Reebok’s Allen Iverson-model sneakers or adidas’ Tim Duncan model.

Because Jones plays for the Ravens, a club outfitted by Nike, he has the company’s omnipresent swoosh on the brain. Nike’s contract with Lower Richland High’s boys team strengthens the bond. “You aren’t allowed to wear other stuff,” Jones says.

SOLE POWER
Relationships between young players and shoe companies make some high school coaches uneasy. They worry that players such as Jones, who is ranked 30th nationally by Rivals.com and has scholarship offers from Clemson, Connecticut, Florida, Florida State, Maryland and South Carolina, might choose their college destinations based a school’s shoe affiliation instead of more substantive criteria.

“Without question it is real,” says Tommy Johnson, former head coach at Wilson High School. “I don’t think there is just a sheer coincidence that you see players from adidas AAU coaches wind up with adidas college coaches. Or Nike or Reebok or whatever.”

Last week, just before catching a plane to Indianapolis for the Nike All-American Camp, Jones says his affiliation with Nike “doesn’t come up” when he gives thought to choosing a college.

Still, the clout wielded by shoe companies is enough to make Chip Atkins, Jones’ coach at Lower Richland High, wary of accepting too much free merchandise. Unlike some teams that get uniforms, practice gear, equipment bags and warm-up suits from shoe manufacturers, the Diamonds coach simply gets 23 pairs of basketball shoes.

“I wanted as little to do with that as possible,” Atkins says. “It comes with strings attached, and I didn’t want anything to do with those strings. That’s how that game is played. That’s the bottom line. I have a problem with that.”

Other coaches, however, rely on sponsorship deals, which can provide as much as $5,000 worth of equipment per year to athletic programs on tight budgets.

“It helped us a great deal,” says Marlboro County High athletics director Dean Boyd, whose school is entering the final year of a four-year deal with Nike. “But I can see where it could be a problem. You just have to be real careful with it.”

Being careful means monitoring the inevitable associations. No one wants to have a repeat of the Myron Piggie situation that occurred earlier this decade. Piggie coached a Kansas City-based, Nike-sponsored summer-league team and admitted giving thousand of dollars to high-school players as enticement to join his team. He was jailed on bribery and racketeering charges in 2001.

In South Carolina, several coaches who are involved in high school and AAU basketball, such as Johnson, tell tales about shady characters who entice players with flashy shoes and exciting travel opportunities.

“Michelangelo couldn’t come in and paint the picture any better than these guys,” says Johnson, who also coaches the adidas-backed Beach Ball Select AAU team. “After time, you learn who you can trust and who is trying to get you hook, line and sinker.”

TO HAVE OR HAVE NOT
Keenan High’s Zach Norris doubles as coach of the Hoopsters AAU team.

His team is not sponsored by any of the big three shoe companies but purchases and wears Nike shoes by choice.

At the Nike Peach Jam this week, Norris coached the Peach Jam Select team, which includes several of his Hoopsters players. In exchange for that work, Nike sends him 30 pairs of shoes that he parcels out to Keenan players who can’t afford to buy new shoes each year.

And that’s as far as Norris wants his association to proceed, even though he realizes it hinders the Hoopsters.

“Everybody wants to be with the big shoe companies because they think they will get paid one day,” Norris says. “We’ve been offered, but we don’t want them to tell us what to do. It hurts us in the long run because we don’t get the opportunity to get some of the top-name players.”

Augusta’s Austin Steed, a 6-8 rising senior who committed to play at USC earlier this month, has avoided temptation. Despite offers of free shoes and gear to jump to other AAU teams, Steed remains with the Hoopsters because he likes the coaching staff.

“A free pair of shoes ...” Steed says with amazement. “I’m like, ‘Hey, it’s a free pair of shoes, and you don’t have to do that much. Just take the shoes and go play.’ But I just stayed here.”

The windfall can be lucrative for AAU teams that link up with shoe companies. Some AAU deals in the state are worth as much as $50,000 annually.

Players from teams such as the South Carolina Ravens, for example, benefit from shoes, uniforms, apparel and travel expenses. That is how Jones and Ravens teammate Mike Holmes were able to attend Nike’s All-American Camp in Indianapolis earlier this month. Since Nike sponsors their team, they were expected to attend the company’s high-profile event, and Nike picked up the tab for their travel.

It’s the scenario Dion Bethea, the Ravens’ coach, laid out for Holmes when he was recruiting the teenage star last year. Holmes, who attends Lee Central High, had been playing for the Sumter Falcons, an adidas-sponsored AAU team.

But Holmes says he wasn’t offered a chance to compete in camps nationwide under that arrangement. “Mostly I was just sitting at home,” Holmes says of his 2004 summer itinerary.

That is not the case these days. Holmes has played before nearly every top college coach in the country during the past two weeks. At the Peach Jam, North Carolina’s Roy Williams, Connecticut’s Jim Calhoun, Illinois’ Bruce Weber and Arizona’s Lute Olson were among the Division I coaches in attendance.

Holmes and the Ravens played games wearing bright uniforms and Nike Shox sneakers fresh from the box. The shoes were from the Shox Lethal TB line, which isn’t on the market yet.

“It’s been pretty good,” Holmes says. “The reason why I chose (the Peach Jam) is college coaches are watching us.”

BACK TO SCHOOL
After a summer of flying across the country, wearing the latest sneakers and playing in front of big-time college coaches, some top players can find the high school hoops season pretty mundane by comparison.

“They are seeing that fast life, and I think they are growing up that fast,” Norris says. “It makes it hard on high school coaches. When we get them back, we have to correct all the things that they were learning wrong all summer.”

In some cases, kids don’t come back to school at all.

One of the top young players with S.C. ties wasn’t anywhere near the Peach Jam last week, through he grew up less than 20 miles away.

Marshall Moses starred as a 6-8 sophomore last season at Aiken High School, which was outfitted by adidas under terms of a one-year contract. Moses attended Reebok’s ABCD last summer and began playing for DI Sports, a North Carolina-based AAU team sponsored by Reebok.

This month, he returned to the Reebok ABCD camp in Teaneck, N.J. Next month, he will enroll at Glenn High School in Winston-Salem, N.C., where he now lives with his AAU coach, Brian Clifton.

For Aiken High coach Thomas Ray, losing Moses is a serious blow to his program. Ray professes no bitterness and says Moses and his family were “up front with him” throughout the process.

But he admits the whole scene involving shoes and summer basketball is murky.

“I think summer basketball gives kids an opportunity for exposure they wouldn’t have,” Ray says. “But everybody isn’t in it for the same reasons. Most high school coaches aren’t in it with an ulterior motive. That’s not the case with all people.”

As for talented young players such as Jones, Holmes and Steed, they often are the ones stuck in the middle, rendered pawns in a larger, corporate game.