Many times, you don’t find a career, your career finds you. For most of us, that’s true and we find ourselves doing something for a living that we wouldn’t have expected. The same could be said about Kobe Bryant in his post-basketball playing career.

Bryant, like many pro basketball players, hate AAU basketball. AAU is the preeminent industry in youth basketball but has had issues in the actual player development in favor of making money and focusing on winning and losing as well as making highlight reels rather than teaching the fundamentals. And Kobe feels like AAU hasn’t done a good job developing players from the youth ranks to professional basketball players.

From a 2015 interview, Bryant made his feelings known about AAU basketball.

“AAU basketball — horrible, terrible AAU basketball,” Bryant said. “It’s stupid. It doesn’t teach our kids how to play the game at all, so you wind up having players that are big and they bring it up and they do all this fancy crap and they don’t know how to post. They don’t know the fundamentals of the game. It’s stupid.”

Because of this, Kobe is opening his own league in Los Angeles. The “Mamba League” is a 40 team co-ed league meant for kids ages 8 to 10 and focus on teaching the fundamentals of basketball, how that translates to being a better person on and off the basketball court and to have fun. Which is an unusual concept in youth sports today. The competition factor will come at a later age but it’s really unnecessary for 8 to 10 year olds.

Along with Nike, Kobe is starting this league to help the kids of Los Angeles evolve with the game as they grow up so they can enjoy it no matter what level of basketball they end up playing in.

The Mamba League isn’t a league geared to making your kid a professional basketball player and in many ways, that’s a good thing. Probably less than 1% of the kids in the Mamba League will play in the NBA. A decent number may play in college and many more will play in high school. But while this isn’t exactly a place to churn out pro basketball players, it will at least give that kid the coaching and teaching that if they have the ability to go pro, they could and actually do some of the basic things a pro needs to know.

It’s nice to be able to drop incredible dunks but if you don’t know how to post, you’re going to be a terrible player who won’t last in the pros that long. And while it’s only available in LA for the time being, it’ll be interesting to see how this league performs and if there would be a possibility for something similar in other cities.

[Uproxx]

About Phillip Bupp

Producer/editor of the Awful Announcing Podcast and Short and to the Point. News editor for The Comeback and Awful Announcing. Highlight consultant for Major League Soccer as well as a freelance writer for hire. Opinions are my own but feel free to agree with them.

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