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A Coach, His Star Recruit, and the Youth Basketball Machine
Ballantine Books
October 2010
On Sale: October 5, 2010
432 pages
ISBN: 0345508602
EAN: 9780345508607
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Sports
Eight years of unfettered access, a keen sense of a story’s
deepest truths, and a genuine compassion for his subject
allow Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist George Dohrmann to
take readers inside the machine that produces America’s
basketball stars.
Hoop dreams aren’t just for players. The fever that grips
college basketball prospects hoping to strike big-time NBA
gold afflicts coaches, parents, and sneaker executives as
well. Every one of them has a stake in keeping America’s
wildly dysfunctional, incredibly lucrative youth basketball
machine up and running—no matter the consequences. In Play Their Hearts Out, George Dohrmann offers an up-close
and unforgettable look inside the maw of that machine. He
shares what he learned from his years spent embedded with a
group of talented young recruits from Southern California as
they traveled the country playing in elite Amateur Athletic
Union (AAU) events. It’s a cutthroat world where boys as
young as eight or nine are subjected to a dizzying torrent
of scrutiny and exploitation. Coaches vie to have them on
their teams. Sneaker companies ply them with free shoes and
gear. “All-star camps” are glorified cattle auctions,
providing make-or-break opportunities to secure the promise
of an elusive college scholarship.
At the book’s heart are the personal stories of two
compelling figures: Joe Keller, an ambitious AAU coach with
a master plan to find and promote “the next LeBron”—thereby
paving his own path to power and riches; and Demetrius
Walker, a fatherless latchkey kid who falls under Keller’s
sway and struggles to live up to the unrealistic
expectations his supposed benefactor has set for him. As
their fortunes take shape and the pressure mounts—Demetrius
finds himself profiled in Sports Illustrated at age
fourteen, while Keller cultivates his business
empire—Dohrmann weaves in the stories of numerous other
parents, coaches, and players. Some of them see their
prospects evaporate as a result of poor decisions and worse
luck. Others learn how to thrive in a corrupt system by
playing the right angles. Written with incomparable detail and insight, Play Their
Hearts Out is a thoroughly unique narrative that reveals the
inner workings of an American game, exposing the gritty
reality that lies beneath so many dreams of fame and glory.
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