Email from Bob Corwin, responding to my post yesterday:

AAU has less power than ever in regard to summer ball in terms of quality players as most of the powerful club programs go in other directions (Nike & Adidas sponsored events) . The kind of abuse that you outline will sadly go on as long as men coach young women. The best thing that a parent could do is tag along on the trips out of town and watch out for unusual behavior of the coach in question. There is no way any one organization could really police this matter.

You are right about the power that a club coach has with regard to exposure, even more so if NCAA ends spring & fall non-high school evaluation as is now planned. If a player is on a bad high school team and makes no effort to be seen in the off-season, that individual has a good chance to have a significant limit on their offers to play college ball.

I don't mean to pick on AAU alone. And, to be honest, I don't know a great deal about how AAU or club hoops function these days.

Club ball seems to be the biggest worry when it comes to sexual misconduct. It happens in other settings too, but high school and college coaches are at least answerable to someone (a principal, an athletic director), and they are subject to the rules of their institution. Many club coaches are answerable to no one at all -- they simply put together teams and start playing. That is why the risk is great.

Unfortunately, the diffuse, decentralized nature of club basketball makes it difficult to do anything -- there is no centralized institution capable of a fully effective response. AAU simply wasn't designed to police coaches.

Still, they can do something. AAU, after all, already has a sexual misconduct policy -- it's just inadequate. They can expand it, clarify it, and add whatever enforcement mechanisms are possible. That wouldn't be a panacea, but it's easy to do, and it wouldn't hurt.

The current structure of club ball leaves the ultimate responsibility for addressing sexual misconduct with individual parents. But that doesn't absolve the rest of us from responsibility. First, we should at least consider trying to change the structure of club ball to institute more oversight. And second, even taking the current structure as a given, we should use whatever means we have (even if they are limited) to address the problem.

At an absolute minimum, AAU (and Nike, and Adidas, and the NCAA, and the WBCA) can use their bully pulpit to educate parents. Send out some letters. Make some materials available at your events. Publish a statement on your website, or at least put up a damn link to WSF's position statement. How hard would that be?

Just because you can't do everything doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything.