I always love listening to Coach G. Heck I always love listening to any Coach, but Coach G is one my favorites. Since I have been coaching high school girl's basketball for going on 23 years now and attending coaching clinics, many (6) where Coach Geno has been an instructor/presenter. The cool part about the clinics, depending on the time the coaches have for Q&A, is they will hold a room for hours!
Anyway, I have been overseas and watched youth and high school ball over there and dealt with AAU coaches here in the states and, like anything, there are rooms for agreement and disagreement. Where I disagree is, we have youth coaches (middle school) who attend the same coaching clinics, watch the same coaching videos, and in many cases, we high school coaches have a feeder system from elementary thru middle school where we are teaching the same offensive and defensive systems, same fundamentals, so when they get to our high school team, they understand the language.
There are AAU coaches who are teaching the fundamentals and getting kids to practice more than once or twice a week before those 4-6 games on a weekend. There are some AAU coaches who can only get 1 day of practice because of a host of reasons, one reason is gym time. Not a lot of places will book up with other events. For example, when I was coaching an AAU team back in 2010, we had to use a church's aux gym for practice and we had to practice after choir practice, if we got lucky.
I agree with Coach G on the European players having a slight advantage on some of the fundamentals, like footwork and passing, but that is because overseas at a typical practice session, which could be 3-5 hours, just depends on the coach and the community setting, those players at the youth level, like our middle school (6th-8th grade), they are going hard but that is all they are doing for those 2-5 hours. They might do a layup drill for one hour. They don't play a lot of 1v1 or 3v3, which we do a lot here in the states. With that part of the game where they are doing a particular drill for 30-60 minutes, a lot of those players have checked out or about to check out and the coach is over there yelling "Do it again!" over and over again. That is their coaching style for some coaches over there and some coaches overseas, will have a team practice for 1-2 hours (2-4 times a week) and they will cover layups and have the players make X number of layups and move on. Technique is taught but if a player has developed that particular technique by the time the team has made X number of layups, no biggie. They move on. They figure, like a lot of coaches, that in time that skill will get better.
Style of play and pace. Youth level overseas is like here in the states, a lot depends on the talent you have around you. Teams that have decent talent and 3-4 players with talent, will get a lot of playing time and the ones that are still developing, they will be on the bench and if they get in, it is only for a few minutes to until they mess up and then they are right back on the bench. Only the truly dedicated ones will stay and deal with those intense practice sessions, much like here in the states.
Parents. Overseas, the parents don't second guess the coach like here in the states. Overseas, if a Coach says "X" it is treated as gold. Players don't bug the coach, for some of the examples I saw. Germany and France has some of the coolest parents. Spain, Africa & Portugal are in that mix as well. I give them their flowers now. Those players are approaching the game the right way. If a kid has that desire to play basketball, don't force them. Just let it happen organically.
But American youth basketball is in good hands because as coaches we travel the world and study what others are doing. Things that we like, we borrow and bring back to the states. Things that look suspect, we leave it over there.
