By Braedan Shea
@Braedan_Shea
As Montverde warmed up for its boys high school basketball matchup against Oak Hill on the second day of the 2025 Hoophall, all eyes – and screens – were on the players. Fans and media alike watched in awe of the thundering, effortless acrobatic slams, highlighted by a full-extension, double-pump flush by Eagles guard King Gibson.
This is the life of an elite-level high school basketball team. For five months of the year, players and their programs travel the country, packing venue after venue as fans and scouts alike eagerly wait to see what may be the next best thing.
In turn, premiere high school programs pack their schedules, playing as many as three games a week. At face value, it makes perfect sense for everyone involved. By playing so many games, players get the opportunity to showcase their skills to as wide an audience as possible while also providing a larger sample size, ideal for many of these players’ goals – playing at the next level. Those who want to see athletes live have more chances to witness games. The school itself gains additional revenue from more ticket sales and televised games.
While it does appear to be an effective system, one issue is often grossly overlooked: are premiere high school teams actually playing too many games?
This season alone, Montverde is slated to play 29 total games – three of which come in a four-day span at Hoophall – and could very well increase based on how deep into the playoffs it goes. Oak Hill plays up to 42 games. Highland School in Virginia, home to the No. 4 prospect in the 2025 class, Nate Ament, will play its first 40-game schedule in program history. Prolific Prep, Utah Prep and Christopher Columbus High School, all teams with top-10 recruits, play between 25 and 30 games a year. For reference, the state of Massachusetts only allows 20 contests a season for public schools, according to the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association. Oak Hill’s matchup against Montverde at Hoophall was the Warriors’ 20th game of the season, and they’re not even at the halfway mark.
In order to pull off this many games, and take into account things like travel, many of these teams turn to playing games on back-to-back days. Oak Hill has a total of seven separate back-to-back games, including a three-straight-game stretch and four in five days at the Iolani Classic from Dec. 17-21. Montverde Academy competes in eight back-to-back contests.
There is more to playing a lot of games than players building their brand and schools making money. One of the biggest reasons premiere high schools play such busy schedules is to mimic what the collegiate and professional seasons look like.
“Most of those folks who are going D-I are playing for those travel teams that play a 30- and 40-game schedule, because it kind of mirrors what it’s going to look like when you get to a Division-I program,” said Dwayne Early, the Athletic Director for Springfield (Mass.) Public Schools. “It’s kind of preparing you for what your goal is.”
Early, who has been Springfield’s AD since November 2018, is no stranger to basketball at the next level. After a standout playing career at Springfield’s Central High School, Early played two seasons as a walk-on at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Even though Early believes that two or three games over the course of a week should be the universal limit for high school basketball, he knows that is hard to enforce with such diverse programs – especially between public and private/national-level programs. But he believes that the regular season is not the issue. Rather, the biggest problem for high school basketball is what takes place after its season: AAU.
Amateur Athletic Union, better known as AAU, is one of the largest, non-profit, volunteer, multi-sport event organizations in the world. The organization, which started in the late 1800s, is dedicated to the promotion and development of amateur sports and physical fitness programs. For basketball, it typically refers to youth “club basketball” or “competitive basketball” or “travel basketball.”
It should be noted that although AAU is an actual organization/brand, AAU basketball is often used as a catch-all term. AAU basketball teams play in tournaments nearly every weekend during the spring and summer months.
This means that players have the opportunity to compete in even more games, and do so with a much more condensed schedule. Teams typically play multiple games a day for a few days in a row. The regulations are loose, as things like practice, warming up and stretching are not required. Because of that, Early believes AAU play can be dangerous for high school-age basketball players.
“I don’t necessarily think the wear and tear on a student athlete comes during the season,” Early said. “But that wear and tear from the spring and the summer circuits – where you really just don’t give your body a chance to rest – is where it really starts.”
Early is not alone in thinking this way. Kelsey Rynkiewicz, an Assistant Professor of Athletic Training and Athletic Trainer at Springfield College, echoes Early’s points. She agrees that high school regular seasons are not the issue, regardless of public school or national level. It’s the added months of action that can cause problems.
The most common concern is overuse. The National Athletic Trainers Association (NATA) recommends that athletes don’t play more hours per week than their age. For example, if you are eight years old, NATA recommends competing for no more than eight hours a week.
Most AAU tournaments are multiple days (generally three) and three-to-four games. The average game length is about two hours. In one weekend, a single team could realistically play for almost 20 hours. Playing this often raises huge warning flags for overuse injuries in itself. But when combined with the high school season, the repetition of the same actions for months on end compounds.
“The risk of all these overuse injuries come up because of the fact that these kids aren’t getting a break,” Rynkiewicz said. “They’re still growing, they’re still developing and they’re focusing on this one specific area in sport, that their overuse is bigger because they’re not doing these other things with their body.”
Athletes that play multiple sports, such as soccer and softball, use their entire body during the course of a year because of the different natures of the sport. They also are only playing one sport for a few months at a time, giving their body a “rest” when the next athletic season occurs. Single sport players, however, don’t have the same rest period, compounding stress to their body.
While many players may think that continuing to play year round is best for their game, it’s one of the worst things for their body. Beyond the physical toll, this much competition in the same sport can also lead to burnout, causing just as much, if not more, damage to a player’s mental health.
AAU is not the only contributor to overuse injuries in adolescents, and it is not just happening in basketball. Another factor is the rise in technology over the past few decades, as kids aren’t playing outside as often anymore. Because of this, children don’t learn how to fundamentally run and jump, or how to be physically active, and that carries into adulthood.
In hoops, this concept of playing as much as possible is having a huge impact, especially on the highest level of the sport: the National Basketball Association.
NBA players catch flak for not competing in all 82 of the league’s regular-season games, though much of which can be pointed to load-management strategies. More often than not it’s a team’s decision to rest players in prevention of injuries, not the player taking themselves out. In turn, he “iron man” athletes are almost extinct from the sport.
In the past 50 seasons (excluding lockout and pandemic shortened seasons), 18,985 players have played at least one NBA game. Yet of those players, only 1,770 (just over 9.3 percent) appeared in every single game during at least one season. From 1973 until 2001, at least 10 percent of the league played in every contest, excluding 1993-94. Since 2001, there has only been one such season, when 10.75 percent of players played in every game in 2002-03.
Each year, the numbers only seem to get worse. Even though more players are entering at least one game, the amount that check in to all 82 is decreasing by the year. The league saw its absolute lowest point in 2021-22, when just five of the 605 qualified players (or 0.83 percent) saw action in every game. While the numbers have increased slightly since, no more than 3 percent of players have played in every game since the pandemic.
And since many top high school players aspire to make the NBA, the future seems pretty bleak, unless something changes, and my suggestion is to encourage athletes to play multiple sports through high school. And the difference in why older generations seemed more durable is as simple as this: they didn’t specialize in just one sport.
“A few years back [NATA] published a piece about top, high-level athletes and looked at if they specialized in just their sport,” Kynkiewicz said. “And none of them did.”
It’s true. Look at some of the greatest basketball players of all time. Michael Jordan played baseball. LeBron James and Allen Iverson started on the gridiron. Beyond the NBA – Randy Moss, Deion Sanders, Bo Jackson, even as recent as Patrick Mahomes – all top athletes who played multiple sports at least through the high school level.
But because of this trend of specializing in one sport, especially at such a young age, by the time athletes reach the NBA level they are physically broken down. Bodies can’t handle year after year of the exact same movements. Specializing in one sport in high school even puts athletes at a disadvantage at the collegiate level.
In a series of studies in 2017 and 2018 by researchers working with the University of Wisconsin’s David Bell, a professor in its Department of Kinesiology’s Athletic Training Program and the director of the Wisconsin Injury in Sport Laboratory, they found that while most youth athletes today believe specialization increases their performance and chances of making a college team, actually the majority of those who reached Division I level didn’t classify as “highly specialized” at the high school level.
It’s clear that sport specialization in basketball is hurting the sport. And if fans want the opportunity to see more show-stopping warm up dunks, drastic change, such as promotion of playing multiple sports is needed.
Photo by Sam MacGilpin/The Student