Basketball Rankings Coming Out Earlier

When Rivers speaks to young traveling teams, he tells them to never stop dribbling. "You're all point guards until further notice," Rivers tells them.

"When's notice?" they often ask.

"At 6-9," he says.

While some pre-teens might possess a size advantage, there is no guarantee they will continue growing. There's also no certainty that an 8-year-old still will be interested in basketball by the time he's a teenager. As basketball increasingly becomes a year-round endeavor, burnout also is a risk.

"It's every sport now, it's not just basketball," Georgia Tech Coach Paul Hewitt said. "Tennis moms and golf moms and Little League dads. I don't think it's good for anyone to specialize that early, but that's what they do now."

Riley Gore, a coach of a Washington area 8-year-old team who has been around the game for decades, said he encourages his players to play other sports, which he believes help prepare them for basketball season.

"You can see potential [at this age], but some kids peak too early," Gore said. "It depends on the ego of the coaches involved [if the hype gets out of hand]. Depends a lot on the parents and coaches."

The Central Kentucky Warriors, led by Lexington, Ky., attorney Shirley Cunningham Jr., mixed basketball with academics on the trip to Memphis. Daily schedules were regimented, allowing for a few hours per day for cultural trips (Graceland, Beale Street, the zoo), another couple for card games and PlayStation and one hour a night for what they called Lesson Lab.

Two parents who are teachers led a lecture in a meeting room in a Holiday Inn Express, where the kids wrote in journals, read aloud, and performed exercises that involved learning nouns and verbs.

"We have kids here, some of whom will have athletic skills enough to go to a Princeton or a Yale or some Ivy League school," Cunningham said. "And if they have the academic skills, that's good. We have some who will have Division I athletic skills, so they have to be academically eligible for that."

Dodd and Rivers believe an 8-and-under tournament is positive as long as coaches emphasize learning the sport and having fun, rather than simply striving to win a national championship.

During one game, Rivers, between sips of Diet Coke, pointed to a player that appeared to be 5 feet.

"He," joked Rivers, "is the best 7-year-old in the world."