Allonzo Trier and Other Young Stars Face Mounting Pressures to Succeed

THE THIN LINE

I was reading an article today about a sixth grade basketball phenom by the name of Allonzo Trier. Trier lives in the Seattle area with his mother and the article described the lengths that Trier and his mother take in order to keep his game on point.

Before I go any further, I would like to first say that I wish Trier all the best in his basketball career and in life in general and this post is not meant to criticize him or his mother in any way. I am just using his example as a means to talk about a bigger, growing problem within the game.

Trier is a 5’5” 110-pound sixth grader who is an aspiring NBA superstar. He maintains a daily workout that consists of about 10 minutes of ball handling work—many of the drills based on the workouts of “Pistol” Pete Maravich.

The bulk of Trier’s workout focuses on shooting where he must make a total of 450 shots from various spots on the floor. When he misses two shots in a row, one gets subtracted from his total and shots that bounce off or roll around the rim do not count.

After completing this workout, twice a week his mother drives him to a local gym where he continues his work with a private basketball tutor. After his private session, his mother then drives him to another two-hour long practice session with his AAU team. After nearly seven hours of practicing and traveling between practices, Trier’s day comes to an end at about 9:30 pm.

This exhaustive workout is all to maintain Trier’s national reputation and No. 1 ranking in his class.

Let that last statement sink in for a minute...“No. 1 ranking in his class”... as a sixth grader. One minute I’m reading an article talking about the difficulty of projecting a player in college basketball into the NBA game and the next minute I’m reading about a sixth grader ranked No. 1 in his class by a national scouting service. Mind boggling!

At what point is all of this a little too much. We are talking about a sixth grade kid here. A sixth grade kid who has his own line of clothing with his own signature and motto. A sixth grade kid who receives endless free merchandise from shoes to a shipment of Under Armour gear from Brandon Jennings, who now plays professional basketball in Italy after being ranked as last year’s top high school point guard prospect.

A sixth grade kid who has been flown around the country by AAU teams and basketball promoters to play in their events. And a sixth grade kid who has his private school tuition and academic tutoring paid for by the charitable foundation of an NBA player and receives free dental care.

His mother has an interesting quote in the article, “They’re doing nice things for my son, things that he needs and I can’t afford. So how can I say no?”

I thought about that quote and asked myself, being a parent, would I do the same thing? To be honest, I would have to say I don’t know.

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