Basketball Rankings Coming Out Earlier

Greatness Already Being Predicted For 6-, 7- and 8-Year-Old Players

MEMPHIS, July 2 -- Minutes after the Maryland Lakers lost in a national basketball tournament here this week, someone asked the team's coach, Kenneth Atkinson, if he felt if anyone competing would one day play in the NBA.

Atkinson, a 35-year-old who owns a dump-truck business and also coaches youth football, immediately pointed to two players on his team.

One is 6 years old. The other just turned 7.

"By the time they are 12," Atkinson said, "they'll be all-Americans."

As the NBA continues to get younger -- a record eight high school players were drafted in the first round last month -- the starting point to find talent begins earlier and earlier. Twenty-nine teams from around the country gathered in Memphis this week for the first 8-year-old-and-under national Amateur Athletic Union tournament. The event represents the next step in the controversial world of amateur basketball, where players are nationally ranked as young as the fourth grade and kids spend much of their summers traveling around the country participating in camps and tournaments.

The tournament featured players jostling over seats on the bench and skipping rocks in parking lot puddles, and one coach telling his players, "Win a couple more games and you can ride all the go-carts you want."

The tallest player stood just over 5 feet; the shortest didn't reveal a glimpse of ankle under his long, silky shorts.

There were other aspects not as innocent. Many in attendance felt they were watching a few NBA superstars in the making. "I saw some kids who might not be 8," said Reggie Parker, a Maryland Lakers assistant. "If they are 8, there's some future Kevin Garnetts around here."

Bobby Dodd, AAU's president, said the strongest arguments for an 8-and-under tournament are that kids learn sportsmanship and get to participate with peers of varying ethnic backgrounds.

"We do not create the need to rank," Dodd said. "We don't rank kids. We don't do all-American teams. . . . I don't think you can say that an 8-and-under tournament forces you to rank them. If the scouting services and [newspapers] think you need to worry about ranking 8-year-olds, you all need to find something else to cover. There's got to be better things out there than worrying about ranking 8-year-olds. Plus, I think it sends the wrong message to them by ranking them."

The AAU oversees 250-300 national championships in 35 sports each year. Dodd did not rule out holding 7-and-under national tournaments in the future, saying the "demand by the consumer will dictate whether we do or don't," but said one is not on the immediate horizon. Asked how young AAU could go, Dodd said, "Where's the bottom, I don't know."

"That's sick," Jerry Tarkanian, a former college basketball coach for more than 40 years, said of ranking kids. "Totally sick. They never used to have any of that."

Before one game Thursday night, two men, Kurk Lee and Charles Moore, sat a few feet apart on a bleacher. Lee, a father of a player on the Bentalou Bombers (Maryland area) team, felt his team's guard, Justin Jenifer, was the best 8-year-old in the country.

Moore, an assistant for the Spartanburg, S.C., Bucks, thought his team's guard, Perry Dozier, was the best 7-year-old in the country. "If this kid isn't the second coming of Earvin [Magic] Johnson . . . ," Moore said earlier of Dozier, a deft ballhandler the coaching staff expects to grow to at least 6 feet 8 because his father is 6-10, his grandfather 7-4.