should i play aau?
should my child play aau?

What's necessary to have a great AAU experience:

Having a trustworthy coach (and program)
Making sure that you are playing competition where games are decided within 12-ish (or less) points. You can ask the coach about this before joining the team.
Make sure that you're going to get a good number of minutes (not just pay to sit on the bench).

When should you opt-out of playing AAU basketball:

If you are self-motivated and know that you need to be working on in the off-season, then you can opt-out of playing AAU

The Long Story

First off, if there is trust in the coach, then there could be a lot of positives that can come out of an AAU experience. If the coach tells you with high certainty that you'll be playing high level competition, then that is half the battle. If you trust the coach and you know that you will be getting a decent amount of minutes, then this will be the second half of the puzzle is important.

I've heard many horror stories of both lower level and higher level players that played on AAU teams and weren't getting a lot of minutes, and ultimately were not happy with their AAU experience. This story is more common than not.

The positive and social aspect you're continuing to play basketball, is a positive of AAU. But with that said, do you need to play AAU to improve and the answer is absolutely not? You don't need it. You can improve on your own. You can get a trainer. There are many, many different ways to play the game without having to play AAU.

Make sure that you are going to get playing time

The drawbacks of playing AAU is not getting any playing time and then spending entire weekends sitting on the bench at a tournament, and not getting better. AAU practices are rarely effective in developing players, since the amount of time spent together is so small. This same time can be spent by yourself in a gym, working on things that are important to you. The younger you are, the less you need AAU. Imagine that you're driving to and from practices and games and that time can be much better used by working on personal development or strength training and speed.

A lot of valuable time is lost in transition when you are playing AAU basketball. So keep that in mind. If you are a self-motivated player and know what you need to work on for the off-season, and have very specific goals, then you're probably better off.

I coached some freshmen players this year that were shooting 30% from the 3-point line and need to spend a considerable amount of time improving their shot percentage in practice. So if you are purposeful of what you need to improve in your game, then playing AAU does not rank very high on their priority list this year.

Make sure that you are playing competitive games

If you're playing at a higher level of AAU, you at least know what you're in for, although there still may be a chance that there's a huge discrepancy between your team and the teams you play, even though the competition level will be high. At the lower levels of AAU there may even be a larger discrepancy between teams, resulting in no one getting better when they play games.

So make sure you find a good coach that your friends/family have played for, and can trust that he'll find the correct level of competition and get you minutes to play them.

The sweet spot of competition is playing games that are within the 10-ish point area. You don't want to play easy teams and dominate them by 20+ points or lose by 20+ points cause then no one is getting better on either end.