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SoCalHoops Tournament News

Is The Big Time Too Big?
Apparently Not.--(July 27, 1998)

The Las Vegas Sun, the other local Vegas paper (the Review-Journal is the other one, and on Sunday, they run a combined edition) also provides some great coverage for prep basketball events, from the Big Time to the Grand Finale, to local club hoops, to high school and college basketball.

Today's edition of the Sun ran an interesting piece on the Big Time, and had some interviews with adidas' director of camp/recruiting operations, Sonny Vaccaro. Vaccaro is perhaps best known for developing Nike's "system" of recruiting players who eventually endorse Nike products, and many credit him with the involvement of Michael Jordan with Nike. Several years ago, he and Nike had a falling out, and he left to join adidas, and has been largely successful in re-creating the program of basketball camps and tournaments that has made Nike such a success in the high school and college basketball. Of course, Vaccaro, the Pumps, and Larry McKay are all heavily involved in putting on and promoting the annual Big Time Tournament. This year the field was up to 224 teams, and there are plans to make it even bigger next year.

And there are also going to be some pretty big changes for the structure of the Big Time, if the press reports are to be believed:

1. A player must have high school eligibility remaining. This means that there will be no more "Prep" school players who have graduated from high school. Just what is meant by "high school eligibilty" has yet to be defined, but it's probably not a bad idea. The idea of limiting eligibility to those who play high school is to insure that the college coaches only see those kids who might be recruited. According to McKay and Vaccaro, the college coaches don't want to see Prep School players who are "post graduates", i.e., the Schea Cottons of the world. Is this a good thing? We're not sure, because some kids go to prep school to improve their academics, not to try to get college exposure. Anyway, it looks like the prep school "post grads" or "5th year seniors" like Bradley Jackson, Doug Wrenn, and others won't be able to play in the Big Time next summer.

2. A player will have to play with either his high school team or one club team. The article notes that one of the major problems of allowing players to play for more than one team is when a club brings multiple teams, and one is eliminated, some of the better players show up on the other club teams, thus making the competition "unfair". We're not sure about the logic of this, since if the team a player is moving over from was eliminated, theoretically at least, that player is also probably a weaker player, so moving to a team that's still in contention shouldn't matter. But we personally believe this is a good thing. A player should play for one team, and if they lose, then he's out with the rest of his team. This gives the coaches the opportunity to see the maximum number of players, and the Big Time really isn't about "teams" winning or losing, but about exposure for college recruiting. Really. That's the truth. It has absolutely zero to do with winning or losing.

3. This was not mentioned in the Las Vegas Sun article, but the real reason these changes are being implemented it seems to us is an attempt to persuade the NABC (National Association of Basketball Coaches) and the NCAA that the "club" and AAU tournaments, especially the shoe-company camps and tournaments which fill the month of July, are "under control." We'll write a bit more about that in another article.

For now though, here's the Las Vegas Sun article about the Big Time. See for yourself. Is it "too big" and what do you think about the changes. Let us know and we'll make sure that adidas and the event organizers hear your opinions.

Las Vegas' Big Time Tournament ready to
get even bigger

By Spencer Patterson
LAS VEGAS SUN

So now that 557 games involving 224 teams at six sites are over, it's time to ask the all-important question: Has the annual Big Time Tournament gotten too big?

Not according to tournament co-director Larry McKay, who is planning to open the door for 16 more squads in next year's event.

"We have the capabilities with gyms and so forth to go to 240 teams," said McKay, who started the event with 64 teams just four years ago. "But I don't think going beyond 240 would make sense."

For some of the college coaches who descended Southern Nevada for the six-day extravaganza, having games at high schools as far apart as Cheyenne in North Las Vegas and Green Valley in Henderson doesn't make sense.

But McKay deflects criticism by arguing that limiting participation only reduces opportunities for young players to gain exposure.

"The college coaches in some cases complain about it being too large and the venues being too far apart, but it isn't just for the college coaches," McKay said. "And now, a lot of the colleges are bringing more than one person here (for the Big Time)."

McKay did say that once auxiliary gymnasiums are completed at Clark, Valley and Rancho, the
tournament will consider those centrally located high schools.

This year, the event used main and auxiliary gyms at Cimarron-Memorial, Cheyenne, Green Valley, Silverado, Las Vegas and Durango, the tournament headquarters. Las Vegas was a last-minute replacement for Palo Verde, which was scrapped after the floor was deemed unusable.

As for rules changes, McKay said he and adidas Director of Basketball Operations Sonny Vaccaro have agreed to set an eligibility limit for participants. "In the past, it's always been about getting recruitable kids seen by coaches," McKay said. "That meant that if a kid was going to go to prep school, he could play. Now there's more and more kids going to prep school, and because of that we're going to limit it to kids with high school eligibility left."

McKay also plans to restrict athletes from playing for more than one squad, another result of a trend he detected during this year's tourney. "We allowed kids to play for their high school team and an all-star team," he said. "But we realize now that some other things can happen. A team can bring three squads, and if one gets knocked out, they can bring players from that team onto their other team."

Overall, though, McKay and Vaccaro left Durango after Monday's championship thrilled with the success of the nation's largest summer tournament. "I think the city of Las Vegas should be as proud of this event as any convention they host," Vaccaro said.

"We accomplished what we wanted to accomplish," McKay said. "We got kids playing basketball for a week, and I think we did a lot for Las Vegas. "They talk about visitors being down. But we brought 218 teams in from out of town and they all spent money on rooms and food, even if they didn't pull one slot machine."