Published in The New York Times Magazine
March 22, 2009

After school on a recent afternoon, Allonzo Trier, a sixth grader in Federal Way, outside Seattle, came home and quickly changed into his workout gear — Nike high-tops, baggy basketball shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt that hung loosely on his 5-foot-5, 110-pound frame. Inside a small gymnasium near the entrance of his apartment complex, he got right to his practice routine, one he has maintained for the last four years, seven days a week. He began by dribbling a basketball around the perimeter of the court, weaving it around his back and through his legs. After a few minutes, he took a second basketball out of a mesh bag and dribbled both balls, crisscrossing them through his legs. It looked like showboating, Harlem Globetrotters kind of stuff, but the drills, which Trier discovered on the Internet, were based on the childhood workouts of Pete Maravich and have helped nurture his exquisite control of the ball in game settings — and, by extension, his burgeoning national reputation.

One of the Web sites that tracks young basketball prospects reports that Trier plays with “style and punch” and “handles the pill” — the ball — “like a yo-yo.” He is a darling of the so-called grass-roots basketball scene and a star on the A.A.U. circuit — which stands for Amateur Athletic Union but whose practices mock traditional definitions of amateurism.

All youth sports now operate on fast-forward. Just about any kid with some ability takes road trips with his or her team by the age of 12, flying on planes and staying in hotels. That used to happen, if at all, only after an athlete was skilled enough to play in college. Now it occurs in just about any sport organized enough to form into a league. But basketball operates at a level beyond other sports, and in recent years, the attention, benefits and temptations that fall on top high-school players have settled on an ever-younger group.

Trier has his own line of clothing emblazoned with his signature and personal motto: “When the lights come on, it’s time to perform.” His basketball socks, which also come gratis, are marked with either his nickname, Zo, or his area code, 206. He’s expecting a shipment of Under Armour gear soon, thanks to Brandon Jennings, last year’s top high-school point guard and now a highly paid pro in Italy. He is flown around the country by A.A.U. teams that want him to play for them in tournaments — and by basketball promoters who use him to add luster to their events. A lawyer in Seattle arranged for Trier’s private-school tuition and academic tutoring to be paid for by the charitable foundation of an N.B.A. player, and the lawyer also procured free dental care for Trier.

Many of the top competitors in this month’s N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, and most of the young N.B.A. players, have emerged from the culture that Trier inhabits. They made their reputations at all-star camps, where team play is hardly encouraged. To have any hope of establishing winning squads, college coaches must try to deprogram their young stars — but only after first flattering them and granting them scholarships.

Marcie Trier is a single mother who makes a modest salary as a social worker at a shelter for victims of domestic violence. The two-bedroom apartment she shares with her son is Section 8, federally subsidized housing. What accrues to Allonzo because of his basketball exploits leaves Marcie feeling dazzled, bewildered, seduced and wary. “They’re doing nice things for my son, things that he needs and I can’t afford,” she told me. “So how can I say no?” But she knows the reason for the largesse. “If his game falls off, they will kick him to the curb. That’s what makes me nervous, and I don’t want it to happen.”

Marcie, who is 33, said she has “obsessive tendencies, and I think Allonzo’s sort of the same way.” To ensure that his basketball skills will keep evolving and he won’t be cast aside, Trier practices obsessively. After about 10 minutes of ballhandling at the gym, he moved on to what makes up the bulk of his daily workout — shooting. He must make (not just try) 450 shots a day from various spots on the floor, beginning with short- and midrange attempts, then on to shots from beyond the three-point line. His mother, who works an early shift so she can get home for these sessions, does the rebounding and keeps the tally of made shots. When he misses two in a row, which rarely happens, she subtracts one from his total. Shots that bounce off or roll around the rim before going in are not counted, which was Allonzo’s idea a couple of years ago in response to his mother’s belief that he should strive to “control his own destiny.” He figured he should train to be a dead-eye shooter rather than one who hopes for some kind of luck.

As Allonzo practiced, Marcie, who was a gymnast and ballet dancer through her teens, wore a pink warm-up suit and flip flops, which clattered against the gym floor when one of his shots missed so badly that she had to chase it down. Mostly she just caught the ball after it came through the net and then quickly passed it back to him. The sound in the otherwise-quiet gym was rhythmic and mesmerizing — the repeated swish of the ball as it rippled through the net, followed by a smack when the return passes hit Allonzo’s hands. I could have closed my eyes and tallied the made shots just by listening.

At one point, after Allonzo uncharacteristically missed three of four, Marcie said, “Put more arc on it.” He made the correction and hit the next 11 in a row. Mother and son appear to be in almost perfect sync. She never has to push him to practice, and he does not have to convince her why basketball should be at the center of their lives. They rarely disagree or argue, but a continuing point of contention is that Allonzo wants to take instruction only from his coaches. “They know the game,” Marcie said, “but I see him shoot 3,000 shots a week, so I think I know his shot better than they do.”

Putting up so many shots is a hard workout, especially since Trier releases many of them on the move, after a couple of dribbles and a juke — as if he were trying to elude a defender. He stopped several times for short breaks and a few gulps of a sports drink. Each time, his mother rubbed an herbal ointment on his knees, which, not surprisingly, were aching.

But this was only the beginning of his basketball day. After he made his quota of shots, which took about 90 minutes, Marcie drove Allonzo to another gym nearby, where a local high-school coach who moonlights as a private basketball tutor put him through an hourlong workout that included more ballhandling and shooting, followed by a vigorous session of one-on-one play. (These workouts occur twice weekly.) From there, they drove about 20 minutes into downtown Seattle, where he practiced for another two hours with his A.A.U. team.

As that session was coming to an end, at about 9:30 p.m., and after he had been practicing or traveling between practices for nearly seven hours, a player pulled Trier down with an arm across the neck as he drove toward the basket. In football parlance, he was “clotheslined.” In the N.B.A., such a foul would be considered flagrant and the offender ejected from the game and fined. Trier picked himself up and kept playing. Marcie, watching the practice with other parents, explained to me that her son’s fame makes him a marked man, even among some teammates. She felt that the perpetrator in this case was not a friend to her son and might have acted with malice.

When Trier came over for a water break a few minutes later, he said: “He didn’t even tell me he was sorry. Don’t you think he should have apologized?” He had tears in his eyes and said his neck hurt, but mostly he just seemed like an exhausted little boy who needed to go home to bed.

Elite basketball stands apart for two main reasons. First, prodigies do exist, and the game’s cognoscenti like to believe they can identify them. If a kid is lavishly skilled, athletic and looks as if he’ll grow tall enough — and seems to possess the artistry and imagination that are the components of true basketball genius — he may be anointed by the wise men of hoops. And some of the time, they will even be right. (Scouts are less tempted to project greatness in football and baseball, where it is often just the biggest, fastest or most coordinated kids who excel early.)

The other reason for basketball’s difference has to do with economics and incentives. Many of the best players come from poor neighborhoods and single-parent homes. The shoe companies, Nike and Adidas most prominently, along with apparel makers like Under Armour, pour money into the system, hoping to win the loyalty of kids who might become the next LeBron James. They finance the best A.A.U. teams and find ways to funnel gear to the most promising players. It’s a relatively small investment for these companies, even if they make bets on hundreds of kids, but to the families it can seem like a lot — not just the material goods but also what the attention and gifts seem to foreshadow. Think of it this way: Youth soccer may seem out of control, and here in the U.S. there’s no big pot of money at the end of the rainbow, and few suburban families believe their kid’s talent is going to get them to a better class of subdivision.

Basketball has a different DNA. It’s a city game, an intimate sport dense with colorful characters, some of whom invariably turn out to be nefarious. Going back to the 1940s, and as recently as the mid-1990s, college basketball has survived periodic point-shaving, or gambling, scandals orchestrated by insiders with connections to top players. Last year, an N.B.A. referee began serving a 15-month prison term for criminal charges related to gambling on games.

Nor do college coaches as a group distinguish themselves through their ethics. Technically, they are not allowed to talk with prospective high-school recruits until June of a player’s sophomore year. But in the last two years, coaches at major schools have offered scholarships to highly regarded eighth graders, which has put an even greater focus on players in Trier’s age group. Tim Floyd, head coach at U.S.C., made two such offers in the last two years, and he hired the father of one recruit to be on his staff. (“College Basketball Coaches Are Now One Step Away From Recruiting Embryos,” the Web site FanIQ headlined an article after the Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie offered a scholarship to another eighth grader last spring.)

In January, the N.C.A.A. expanded its recruiting rules to more explicitly cover seventh and eighth graders, putting them largely off-limits to college coaches. Jim Haney, the executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, explained to me why coaches were aggressively dipping into the lower grades. “You can talk all you want about ‘coaching players up,’ ” he said, using the phrase for improving players through intense instruction. “But you can only get so far with that.” To qualify for the N.C.A.A. tournament, and certainly to advance through the regionals and into the Final Four, he said, requires “the top talent, and you go out and find it where you can. It’s a competitive business.”

N.C.A.A. recruiting rules tend to be arcane, with mystifying exceptions. For example, college coaches cannot make calls or write personal letters to players before the end of their sophomore year of high school. But they can signal their interest by sending “questionnaires,” without personal letters, to players of any age. When I was with Trier in Seattle, he was excited to have just received a questionnaire from Memphis, one of the premier college teams, which conformed to the rules because it did not include a personal letter. It’s possible that Trier could have been a recipient of a random mass mailing, but considering his reputation, he was probably right to assume that the school’s head coach, John Calipari, or someone on his staff, knew something about him. (Marcie Trier told me that she receives regular text messages from a coach with another college team, which would be an N.C.A.A. violation.)

The recent agreements with young players lead to the question of how you offer a scholarship to a kid, and have it accepted, when you’re not really allowed to communicate with him. The answer: While college coaches and their assistants cannot mix with under-age recruits at all-star camps, they can host players of any age at their own on-campus summer camps. If one of the really heralded players shows up, coach and player — even, in theory, a second grader — can make a deal (though it has to happen after the camp is over).

Trier has already attended a couple of camps where he was sought out by on-campus coaches and asked if he was considering the school. At one, he told me, a coach took him aside for a private, behind-the-scenes tour of the team’s locker room and then upstairs to a pavilion above the court that contained trophies and other memorabilia. “It caused some resentment,” according to his mother, “because other campers saw it. Parents got upset.”

None of this was necessarily against the rules, because these were coaches’ private camps. Floyd, the U.S.C. coach, explained in an interview posted on a college-sports Web site two years ago how such innocent-seeming encounters can quickly lead from Point A to Point B and all the way to “S” — a scholarship offer to a kid who has not yet begun high school. “I think that we all recognize that young people can have great talents, and if those players have dreamed about going to your school, they tend to ask you if they’re being offered a scholarship by your school,” he said. “And if you don’t tell them that you are, then you offend them. If you tell them you’ve offered, sometimes you have to be prepared for them to accept it.”

The scholarship offers are not binding on either party because they cannot be put in writing until a player’s senior year. But Haney, of the coaches’ association, and others say they are unwise because they bring the hurly-burly and distractions of recruiting to kids too young to handle them, and they bind parties to each other, at least verbally, well before either can know if it’s a good match. The early recruiting also brings what Haney calls the “nonscholastic influences” to children — shoe-company representatives and others who have a commercial interest in befriending young talent.

I asked Haney if the rule against recruiting middle-schoolers, which he termed a “new line of demarcation,” will be respected. “In this business,” he said, “you have people who follow the rules, you have those who want to follow them but struggle sometimes and you have a third group that sees every rule as a little speed bump. They slow down and then navigate over it.”

In the upper tiers of elite youth basketball, it is common for fathers, if they are present, to be highly involved. They pester coaches, camp directors and scouting services for greater exposure for their sons, and they videotape games and splice together the best moments for display on YouTube. (No player on YouTube has ever missed a shot.) Those with absent fathers tend to accumulate father figures along the way — men who may genuinely want to help, along with others who may hope to broker scholarships, share in endorsement deals or just remain part of the entourage if a player strikes N.B.A. gold.

Steve Goldstein, general counsel in the U.S. for Tokio Marine, the Japanese insurance company, is a former small-college basketball player who spends much of his free time coaching youth basketball in New York and leading a foundation called Beyond Basketball. It offers academic assistance to players who excel at their sport but without help might fall short of the classroom standards needed to qualify for a college scholarship. Goldstein first met Trier at a basketball camp last summer in Chantilly, Va. “I saw him play and noticed his swagger,” says Goldstein, who has become an adviser to Marcie Trier (one of many). “There’s just something about the way he carries himself on the court. But the way I got to know him was that one morning in the hotel, he came up to me and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, can I have a ride to camp?’ And I just took him every morning after that.”

Trier has never met his father, who Marcie says was her first boyfriend. She has lost touch with him. All Trier knows is that he was African-American and about 6-foot-3. Right now, Trier is 5-foot-5, slightly above average for his age, but short for a youngster with elite-basketball ambitions. “I guess I’ll be at least 6-3,” he told me, “but I’m hoping for maybe 6-5.” (His mother is about 5-foot-4. She was born in the Pacific Islands but does not know much more than that because she and her twin sister were in foster care before being adopted by a family in the Midwest. She has no other children, and her only close family nearby is her sister.)

Marcie herself has become immersed in grass-roots-basketball culture. She worries that her son does not encounter sufficient challenges close to home, expresses her opinions to his coaches and is open to opportunities for him beyond Seattle. In recent years, several players who have come through Trier’s A.A.U. program, Seattle Rotary Style, have gone on to the N.B.A. But Daryll Hennings, the senior athletic director at the Rotary Boys and Girls Club, which sponsors the team, told me that Trier is flying at a higher altitude — traveling more, competing for a greater number of teams, mixing with more out-of-town coaches and promoters, creating more buzz. “Every year, everything gets bigger, the whole scene, and he’s caught up in it,” Hennings said.

In just three months last summer, Trier flew on four separate occasions to the East Coast to play in events in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia — in addition to making shorter excursions to Los Angeles and San Diego. When I was with him in January, his mother took a call from a coach in Southern California who wanted to fly him down for a tournament the following weekend. (She declined; he was already committed to play in Texas one week after that.) She showed me a text from an A.A.U. parent who wanted Trier’s e-mail address for his son. “I would like my son to branch out and build relationships with some of the top guards out there,” he wrote.

The father of a top player in New York, Jerron Love, had also been in touch and was hoping to lure Trier to a new team, one that would not practice together but rendezvous in various cities for big tournaments. I had met Jerry Love, Jerron’s father, who is well known in New York basketball circles for his zealous advocacy on behalf of his son. He posts Jerron’s highlights on YouTube, sends out a promotional DVD (“Just 10: Jerron Love, a k a the Golden Child”) and communicates in e-mail blizzards.

We sat together one evening at the bar at Londel’s, a soul-food restaurant in Harlem, as he scrolled through a BlackBerry on which he had seemingly downloaded the entirety of known basketball knowledge, which he was doling out to his son in their private training sessions. “You see this right here,” he said, showing me one of the entries. “It tells you the three options you have on a secondary fast break — pull up for a jump shot, find a player spotted up for a three-pointer or hit the trailer for a layup. Jerron knows this stuff, but other kids his age, they’re not there yet. I put this stuff into him like a computer chip.”

When Love got to a page describing how a defender should squeeze between a player setting a screen and the ballhandler, he became animated as he demonstrated proper positioning, bumping my shoulder and nearly toppling me from my bar stool. Others patrons were talking quietly over after-work drinks; I noticed a couple of them glance our way with looks of mild alarm.

Marcie Trier told me she had participated in conference calls with Jerry Love, other parents and a coach about this proposed new team, but it didn’t look as if it was going to come together. In my conversations with her, she occasionally relayed information that, at first, seemed beyond belief. For example, she told me she had heard that her son might be recruited to play for an A.A.U. team in Texas that travels by private jet and stays in luxury hotels. A team of sixth graders? I checked up on it: the Texas Titans, backed by Kenny Troutt, the billionaire founder of Excel Communications (and father of a team member), have traveled by private jet. At a tournament in Las Vegas, they stayed at Caesars Palace.

Hennings told me he assumes that Trier at some point will be lured away from the Seattle Rotary program. “I swear,” he said, “every time his mom takes him on a road trip, I’m waiting for that call that he’s not coming back, that he’s going to play for this team or that team that’s gonna fly him around and all that. I wish him the best. He’s a hard worker. I want him around for the duration, but I don’t see it happening.”

I met Allonzo Trier for the first time last summer, at the Adidas Junior Phenom Camp in San Diego, the premier annual gathering for pre-high-school talent. I already knew that he was considered a star among stars, and I watched a couple of his games before seeking him out. When we shook hands, he held on to mine for what seemed like 10 or 15 seconds as we began to talk, only letting go after the father of another camper tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he would pose for a picture with his son. “Thank you,” he said to Trier after snapping the photo. “You’re a role model, brother.”

The Junior Phenom Camp was grass-roots basketball in distilled form — a caldron of ambition, networking, gossip and backbiting. The players had been identified and invited to San Diego after attending regional camps. Most of the 360 campers were being charged $450 to participate. All kinds of merchandise was available for purchase, including a camp program for $25 that listed the participants and their heights, hobbies, hometowns and nicknames, which made for interesting reading. There was a G-Money, a K-Money, a Cash-Money and one young man who simply called himself Money. Two campers went by Sir, while others — Da Truth, Superstar, Big Dog, the Chosen One — selected handles that seemed to demand respect. (Trier’s listed nickname was Zo, which is what just about everyone but his mother calls him.)

There were plenty of middle-class kids at the camp whose families paid their way. Other players raised money to attend from individuals or businesses in their communities. Seven of the campers came from an A.A.U. program called Houston Select, coached and bankrolled by Steve Trauber, a managing director and head of global energy investment banking for UBS. “I’ve got a great job,” Trauber told me, “so I’m lucky enough to be able to sponsor the whole team.”

Trauber’s sixth-grade team traveled to tournaments two weekends a month and played 118 games in 2008 — 36 more than an N.B.A. team does in the regular season. He estimated that he spent more than $200,000 on travel and other expenses. The star among his sixth graders was Jesse Pistokache (White Chocolate), a six-footer who lives all the way down in the Rio Grande Valley and travels most weekends to Houston to practice with his teammates — or join them on another flight to a tournament. “This is our life,” his mother, Teri Mata-Pistokache, a college professor, told me. “You’ve just got to give in to it. If he wants to meet his goals in basketball, this is what we’ve come to understand is necessary.”

Nearly everyone in the camp was there either to defend a high national ranking — as was Trier, who for two years has been the top-ranked player in his class — or to improve a ranking. The idea is to “be on the radar,” as one parent put it, in order to be among the players whom college coaches will want to scout. The level of cynicism among parents and even some of the kids was extreme. I heard talk that the biggest stars among the high-school players attend these kinds of camps only if they are paid — that is, they demanded cash in addition to free travel and camp tuition. Trier himself named a New York-area high-school star who is rumored to play that game. “He doesn’t go anywhere unless he gets a minimum of $15,000,” he said. I don’t know if that’s true, but it says a lot about this whole business that people believe it is and talk so openly about it.

The campers were put on teams that played twice a day, on one of six full courts, in a cavernous gymnasium at Alliant International University that looked as if it had been an airplane hangar. Presiding over everything was Joe Keller, a former A.A.U. coach in Southern California and the president of the company that runs this camp — as well as, he said, 277 regional camps for different age groups, for both boys and girls, in the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico, Japan and China.

Keller is an imposing man, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested. Baseball was his sport as a kid, but with his big frame and goatee, he looked more like an N.F.L. middle linebacker. Keller and his staff consistently tell the kids that they are at the beginning of a long journey and should just focus on learning to play proper basketball because, after all, no one at their age can really be projected as a pro or even as a college prospect. In private, everyone lapses.

“Have you seen No. 109?” Keller asked me, referring to Pistokache. “He’s a monster, isn’t he?” At a different point, he said, “And 106?” He was referring to another sixth grader, a skilled, smaller player but one who everyone seemed to know had a 6-foot-11 father. “Going to be a pro,” Keller said. “You mark my word.”

As I was talking with Keller just inside the gym’s front door, an angry-looking man, the coordinator of referees at the camp, came rushing his way, and they quickly got into a loud, profane argument. Apparently, some officials had not shown up for their assigned games, and Keller wanted to fire the coordinator. Their dispute escalated, and Keller shouted: “You want to take this outside? C’mon, let’s go, I’ll kick your [expletive]! I’ll beat the [expletive] out of you.” They marched out to the parking lot, where the other man took off his shirt and wristwatch and laid them on the hood of a car, but before they could brawl, one of Keller’s other employees grabbed his arm and led him back toward the gym.

When Keller got back inside, he muttered to me: “You won’t see him again” and described him with a vulgarity. Then he resumed telling me about his business. “This camp in particular is branded nationally,” he said. “It sells out six months in advance. We’ve got 900 kids on the waiting list.”

When I asked how much money he made from his basketball endeavors, he replied: “Not much. Not as much as you might think.” Then he added that to the extent he does turn a profit, he pours most of it back into a charity he says he is affiliated with that benefits abused children. “It’s not about money to me,” he went on. “I just try to create an avenue so the kids can learn things and be something in life. It’s about character, integrity, hard work, knowing the difference between right versus wrong. If they get that down, they’ll have a good life.”

The Junior Phenom event is categorized as an “exposure camp” to distinguish it from camps whose primary mission is teaching. But the sixth, seventh and eighth graders who attend are really performing for an audience of one: Clark Francis, the editor of Hoop Scoop, an online tout sheet, many of whose subscribers are either college coaches or parents who want to see how their kids measure up.

Without the presence of Francis, the camp would lose much of its edge and a chunk of its paying clientele. “They all know that Clark Francis is going to be here,” Keller explained. “They know coming in: you’re going to get evaluated, you’re going to get ranked. That’s part of the branding. Without it, we wouldn’t get players. But we get the best players, and they get what they pay for.”

The Hoop Scoop editor is a man of strong opinions and snap judgments. “It’s not P.C. what I do, ranking young kids,” Francis told me. “I know that. Some people like it, some people don’t. But if you’re playing at an event and I’m not scouting it, nobody knows and nobody cares.”

Francis, who is a short and plump 49-year-old, never played the game at even the high-school level, but he has managed to turn his passion into a vocation. He has attended 36 consecutive Final Fours, and he told me that his apartment in Louisville contains so much college-basketball memorabilia that visitors get lost in it for hours, as if it were a museum exhibit. He speaks in a torrent of words that consist almost entirely of basketball references. “Did you hear about the Long Island Lightning?” he asked me as we sat having lunch at an In-N-Out Burger near the gym in San Diego. I thought he was alerting me to a weather event, perhaps some unlucky weekenders struck down on a beach in Southampton. But he meant an A.A.U. team from Long Island that had just won an important tournament in Orlando.

I walked from court to court with him at the camp as he made notes on a clipboard. His method was to see each of the dozens of teams and rank each player against his teammates, from best to worst, before working up campwide rankings. The frenetic nature of play made it difficult for me to discern quality, but Francis exuded the confidence of a handicapper who makes his bets after casting his eye on the Thoroughbreds in the paddock. “The more times you have to keep going back and looking at a kid, the less likely it is he can play,” he said. “I can usually pick them out in warm-ups. Just how they carry themselves. Does the guy pass the look test? That’s the first thing.”

I asked what attributes he looks for. “Size, athleticism, outside shooting,” he answered. “Bottom line is, if you don’t have one of those things, forget it. Go play soccer. Have a nice life.”

In Major League Baseball, players from the Dominican Republic, many of them raised in poverty, have a reputation as free swingers who will chase almost any pitch rather than work a base on balls. When the former Atlanta Braves shortstop Rafael Ramirez was asked during the 1986 season about why he had gone some 40 games without drawing a walk, seemingly an impossibility, he famously replied, “A walk won’t get you off the island.”

A similar line of thinking prevailed at the Junior Phenom camp. The young players may not have known Francis’s precise methods, but they seemed to have a sense that they had better do something pretty spectacular, and quickly. One morning, I watched a game involving Billy Clark III, a quick and slippery 12-year-old guard from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn who had the speed and moves to evade his defender and get off a shot at any time. Which he did — just about every time he touched the ball. In a 32-minute game, of which he played just a little more than half, he put up 34 shots by my count.

His father, Billy Jr., sat in the bleachers and exhorted him on. He explained to me, “What I told him is, in this setting, you’ve got to establish your dominance.”

Billy’s shooting, while certainly excessive, was pretty much emblematic of how most of the young players approached their mission. They passed only as a last resort. They played indifferent defense, or none at all. To watch this up close was to gain an understanding of the roots of the decline of team play in American basketball.

I talked to Billy Clark III after his game. He had an oddly adult way of speaking. I didn’t really need to ask questions; he had things he wanted me know, as if he had been expecting to be interviewed and rehearsed his lines. “I just want to stay humble,” he said. “If my head gets too swollen, I’m not going to be that good anymore.”

He told me that he was thankful to his father, who had risked his job at an events-planning company to accompany him to this camp. His father asked him, “What are we striving for?” and Billy replied, “Free education!” Billy then added a thought that sounded like a fragment of dialogue from a 1970s after-school special: “I’m just trying to get my family out of the ghetto,” he said.

One afternoon, after Francis grew irritated at having to observe too much middling talent, he said, “C’mon, let’s go watch Allonzo Trier.” Much of his job is a chore, but Francis really enjoys watching Trier, whom he always refers to by his first and last names. “Allonzo Trier is going to make it no matter what,” he told me. “And that’s what makes Allonzo Trier fun to watch. He just does things right.”

A certain kind of sports aficionado likes to feel in the know — that he has seen, or even just heard of, some up-and-coming player before the rest of the world has caught on. A whole industry has grown up around so-called N.F.L. “draftniks” — men (well, 99.9 percent of them are men) who keep track of, say, the offensive lineman from West Texas A&M who might be selected in a late round of the spring draft.

In basketball, the real discoveries must be found among those still in middle school. Le­Bron James’s first high-school game, in ninth grade, was eagerly anticipated by insiders, and the televising of high-school games took off during the four years he was prepping for the N.B.A. at St. Vincent-St. Mary high school in Akron, Ohio. “The explosion in grass-roots basketball is directly related to LeBron James,” Francis said. “People were on him early, so everything moves back a couple of years.”

On the court in front us, Trier was playing for a team designated “Michigan State” with teammates who ranged from 4-foot-8 to 6-foot-1. At first, I didn’t really get all the hubbub. He was clearly a good shooter and deft passer, but the chaos of these games, with everyone desperately trying to make an impression, didn’t really cast glory on anyone. The quality of play was appalling, a crime against basketball.

But on the final day of camp, watching Trier participate in the all-star game, involving those deemed the camp’s best players, I finally did start to see. The game was more organized. His teammates could anticipate his passes and move to the right spots to receive them. At one point, he sped up the court with the ball, lost a defender at half-court with a crossover dribble, reached the foul line and, without picking up his dribble, shoveled a pass with his left hand to a cutting teammate. The whole sequence, and especially the method of delivery — off-hand, off the dribble — was highly sophisticated.

“That” said Francis, “is classic Allonzo Trier.”

A smallish basketball player at the pro or major-college level — say, 6-foot-2 or shorter — has to be extraordinarily fast to become a star. Someone like the N.B.A.’s Allen Iverson, or the budding superstar Chris Paul, may have never encountered anyone as quick as they were until they reached the pros, and even then they will meet just a handful of similarly supercharged little men. Trier looked fast to me, but there were a few others who seemed just as quick. His superiority lay more in the realm of his ballhandling, shooting ability and feel for the game, what coaches call “basketball I.Q.”

Clark Francis did not express any doubts about Trier’s gifts. He referred several times to “the Allonzo Trier phenomenon,” as if it existed apart from him. At the close of the camp, he ranked Trier No. 1 in his class, just as he had in 2007.

Francis posts rankings for players all the way through high school, and he was an enthusiastic advocate of Brandon Jennings, who opted last year to play in Italy rather than in college; Jennings is expected to be a coveted N.B.A. prospect whenever he chooses to return. Francis often likens Trier to Jennings. “You know what Brandon Jennings’s potential is, right?” he asked me. I didn’t, actually. “Top 5 point guard ever to play the game. Does that put it in perspective for you, what I’m saying about Allonzo Trier?”

Late in January, not long after I visited him in Seattle, Trier attended the U.S. Superior Skills Camp in Fort Worth, where, according to Hoop Scoop, he excelled again. Francis’s account gushed about “the continued dominance” of Allonzo Trier. “If you will recall, Trier is the jet-quick point guard that reminds us in so many ways of 6-2 Brandon Jennings, who was the consensus No. 1-ranked high-school player in the nation a year ago and is currently averaging 8.2 ppg in 10 games for Lottomatica Virtus Roma in the Euroleague and . . . just like Jennings, Trier has a flair for the spectacular. . . .”

Comical as the overheated rhetoric may be, it’s hard to imagine that it wouldn’t lead a basketball-loving child to believe he is on a straight course to the N.B.A. Trier and his mother consider Francis an authority, and he praises her as “a smart lady, not your typical nettlesome parent.”

In San Diego, Francis counseled Marcie about the challenge Allonzo faces in living up to a top Hoop Scoop ranking. “Brandon had to be the best player all the way through, just like LeBron James, Kevin Garnett and Sebastian Telfair,” he said, referring to Jennings and three high-school phenoms who went straight to the N.B.A. “That’s the challenge. How do you stay up there?”

I often hear from parents of young athletes that their kids “started late,” even if they joined an organized team at age 7. That’s a defining element of the modern youth-sports culture, the feeling that there is always someone who has a head start or is doing more, and that there is ground to be made up. This drives the professionalism that permeates childhood sport: paid coaches leading teams that were once coached by volunteers; expensive sports tutoring; all the travel; even genetic testing to determine a child’s ideal sport. The culture demands lodestars, young sports luminaries like Allonzo Trier, to show what is possible with early attention, extreme effort and money.

The hype over Trier makes him a much-anticipated prospect in the far-off basketball future. But it also certifies him as someone due concrete benefits right now — for example, the free, personally branded clothing he receives from the label NYICE, a Seattle-area startup. As he travels the A.A.U. and camp circuit, Trier serves as a billboard for the company. It is a form of viral marketing, the hope being that he will attract paying customers.

Seattle has in recent years been a hotbed for young basketball talent. Several highly ranked high-schoolers, including a girl, are also wearing NYICE gear. Gerald Wright, a Bronx native who played college basketball in Seattle, owns the company. “It’s a win-win for the kids and my brand,” he told me. “We want other people to say, ‘If Zo’s wearing it, I want to wear it.’ Meanwhile, he’s got something unique. I don’t think LeBron had a logo in middle school. I don’t think Kobe did. To the young man, it’s a way of saying, you’ve worked hard, so good things will come to you. I don’t see it as exploitative or taking advantage, and the moment I did, I would get out of it.”

(Active N.C.A.A. athletes cannot accept gear and other items, but athletes who are in high school or younger can take just about anything but cash without endangering their college eligibility. Steve Mallonee, the N.C.A.A.’s managing director for academic and membership affairs, said even if his organization wanted to, it couldn’t enforce rules at below the college level because it would have a hard time disseminating its guidelines.)

The more important benefits flowing to Trier concern his academics. Over the summer, tests revealed why he had been reading at well below grade level: he is dyslexic. In A.A.U. ball, he competes as a seventh grader, but academically, he’s in sixth grade because he was held back a year. (Francis includes him in the class of 2014, the age group in which he plays, but he’s really the class of 2015, the year he should graduate from high school.)

Rich Padden, the Seattle lawyer and investor who arranged for Trier’s schooling, said he set about addressing his educational needs after hearing from Steve Goldstein and another coach in New York who had taken an interest in Trier’s basketball and academic progress and had flown him in to play tournaments. Padden arranged for Trier’s testing, private tutoring and tuition to be paid for by the charitable foundation established by Brandon Roy, a star with the Portland Trail Blazers. Padden served as a mentor to Roy in high school, as well as to another N.B.A. player from the Seattle area, Martell Webster. (Padden is also an investor in one of the major manufacturers of basketballs, so Trier, who goes through a lot of balls, has a reliable source for more.)

“Allonzo is the first beneficiary of the Brandon Roy Foundation, hopefully the first of hundreds or thousands,” Padden said. “He fit our criteria. We would have supported him even if he were not a basketball player.”

Trier’s tutor wants to work with him three days a week, but so far Trier has been able to fit in only two sessions a week because of his busy basketball schedule and his limited enthusiasm for them. When his mother asked what would motivate him to be more excited about the tutoring, he answered: more basketball instruction. Private coaches were hired to teach him to play “lockdown defense” and to further refine his shooting. He made 95 of 100 foul shots for his new shooting coach, who identified flaws in his form and said that if they were fixed, Trier could consistently make 98 out of 100.

When I asked Trier about school, he said, “It’s hard for me because I’m not the smartest kid.” But that was not my impression of him at all. Whenever we talked, he displayed a lively curiosity. He had an ease in dealing with people, adults as well as kids. But basketball is clearly easier for him than school.

Marcie Trier, in her travels through the male-dominated world of youth basketball, gets a lot of unsolicited advice. People have told her to take her son out of the Pacific Northwest and go to New York or Texas, where he’ll get better competition and more exposure — which seems to be particularly poor counsel since he’s already the most heralded player in the history of sixth-grade basketball, and Brandon Roy and others have already proved that being from Seattle is no barrier to becoming an N.B.A. multimillionaire.

Others suggest that she should pull Trier away from the spotlight and pare back his basketball schedule. Trier is already being circled by men whose motivations must be constantly assessed. In the coming years, dozens more will come around, and Marcie and Allonzo will have to make some keen character assessments.

“I worry about him,” says Hennings, the athletic director at the Rotary Boys and Girls Club in Seattle. “I worry about injuries. I worry about his knees. I worry about all the people around him. I tell his mom all the time, ‘No one does something for nothing.’ I’m sorry, but some of these people are going to want something down the line. Some of this stuff could come back to bite him. I’m trying to stay in Allonzo’s life and give him the team thing, but I’ve said to them, if you want to explore all that stuff, you’re on your own.”

How much is too much is an unanswerable question in sports. The childhood training routine maintained by Michael Phelps would have driven nearly any other promising swimmer back to dry land. The laserlike focus of the young Tiger Woods was a singular gift, and his practice routine with his father may be replicable, if at all, once in a generation.

It could be that for Trier, taking 450 shots a day, seven days a week, along with the rest of his arduous schedule, is a terrific undertaking that will pay dividends in basketball success and happiness. His joints and spirit will hold up, and he’ll attain his dreams. It is just as likely that he would be as good and have as bright a future by taking 200 shots a day, with Sundays off.

His current lofty status does not confer future success — or protect against the consequences of being a great player at 13 who, by 19, is perceived as having failed to live up to expectations. If becoming a coveted college prospect and signing with a big-time N.C.A.A. program is an endpoint of sorts, Trier has a long time to maintain his standing. By the time he starts playing college basketball, a second Obama administration could be winding down.

Marcie Trier is correct in thinking that his game must not fall off. Her son might not be “kicked to the curb,” but the smart basketball set would move on and find other objects of affection. He has to grow taller. And he has to avoid being swallowed up within the netherworld of grass-roots basketball.

Trier, steely in competition, otherwise exudes a sweetness and a concern for others that is rare among top-level teenage athletes. As I watched him one day going through his workout in the gym at his apartment complex, he caught sight of a younger child in an adjacent room who was swinging dangerously from a piece of weight-training equipment. “Mom!” he yelled as he abruptly let the basketball fall to the floor. “You’ve gotta go over there and make her get off of that.” She went over and told the little girl to climb down.

For the rest of his practice, Trier kept glancing in the direction of the weight room, worried that the girl would climb back up and lose her grip.

Copyright © 2009 Michael Sokolove