Podcast: How are youth basketball and hockey different? Does one sport do it better?

Basketball and hockey are the two most prominent winter sports in New England. But their youth development ecosystems look drastically different.

Full-season models and the USNTDP are foreign concepts to us in hoops, while shoe-sponsored AAU circuits and open gyms are a far departure from what life is like on the ice.

What does each sport get right? What needs to be improved, and where is the future of these two youth sports heading?

This called for a special episode. Steve Hewitt and Ethan Fuller convened with New England Hockey Journal’s Evan Marinofsky and Patrick Donnelly to compare the two sports, giving their assessments of the present and future in the region.

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Highlights

We’ve always been fascinated by the idea of “full-season models” — where prep teams are essentially staying together most of the year under different branding. How do you feel about it and how it works?

Marinofsky: “It’s a very intriguing idea, even to a lot of prep coaches, that you can start in late September (or) October — I mean, some of these academies start in early September and then run through March (or) April. That is a full season; that’s more than a college season. … There’s also the Peak Performance Prep League in the fall, where like schools like Portsmouth Abbey and others play together but under a different name, under different coaches. But they play as one in a league — I think it’s every Sunday that they play in in New Hampshire. And it gives the kids one spot and it’s all the teams playing together. And it does help, I think, towards the end of the year compared to teams where the kids are sort of scattered for fall.”

We’ve both talked about increasing cost being a problem in basketball and hockey. Is there a way you can fix that?

Donnelly: “No — honest answer. The first thing I think of is the equipment. The top pair of Bauer skates is probably $900; it’s maybe even cracked $1,000. … And the elite players are using those elite skates. Whether or not you need them is probably personal preference. … The equipment cost is not coming down, with technology, margins, all this and that. It’s not coming down. So does it become the barrier to entry to join a club team or play in a tournament? There are fees associated with that. Evan and I, we talked about this a couple weeks ago (on the RinkWise Podcast). When does the youth sports bubble burst? It doesn’t.

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