Play Their Hearts Out

Play Their Hearts Out: A Coach, His Star Recruit, and the Youth Basketball Machine is a 2010 exposé by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Dohrmann, a senior writer at American sports magazine Sports Illustrated. The book follows Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) basketball coach Joe Keller, revealing his cynical and manipulative exploitation of teenage basketball players for his own financial gain. Dohrmann points out that Keller’s behavior is encouraged and incentivized by a youth basketball system which increasingly prioritizes the profits to be made in the sports industry over the responsibility to care for and develop young people.

Dohrmann gains access to Keller by promising not to publish anything until his teenage players are in college. “When the boys graduate from high school,” Keller replies, “I’ll be rich and done with coaching.” He doesn’t “give a damn” what Dohrmann writes. Keller also has an angle: Dohrmann works for Sports Illustrated, so having him around creates buzz about what Keller is doing.

Dohrmann discovers that Keller has almost no coaching experience: he is a former car stereo installer with dreams of making it big somehow. Having spotted that there was money to be made in youth basketball, he managed to install himself as a mentor to future NBA star Tyson Chandler, but he allowed Chandler to be poached by rival coach Pat Barrett. When Barrett received hundreds of thousands of dollars in “thank you” money from Chandler (and more as a fee for speaking to Chandler on behalf of sportswear companies), Keller became a laughingstock in AAU coaching circles.



Determined not to repeat his mistake, Keller scours California schools for a prospective talent so young that Keller can earn his loyalty for life. When he discovers prodigious 9-year-old Demetrius “D” Walker, Keller pushes his way into the boy’s life, side-lining D’s mother and neglecting his own family to install himself as a father-figure to the young basketball star, whose own father is absent. Keller repeats this tactic throughout his recruitment, telling Dohrmann that “the perfect team is a team of all single moms.”

Keller builds a strong AAU team on D’s back (called the Inland Stars, and later Team Cal), and begins touting Walker as the next big thing in basketball. He arranges for D to be profiled in Sports Illustrated as “14, going on LeBron.”

Meanwhile, Dohrmann paints a portrait of Keller as an incompetent, cynical coach whose attitude to the boys in his care is at best manipulative and at worst abusive. Keller is a major figure in his players’ lives, as they travel all over the country playing AAU games. Rather than risk losing to a rival team, Keller instructs his team not to play competitively so that he can claim that the loss is “meaningless.” When a team-member’s mom volunteers as an academic adviser, putting in many unpaid hours to help the kids stay on top of their schoolwork and home lives, Keller becomes wary of her influence with his players and cuts her out. Several times he encourages his team to humiliate an outclassed opposition, to the point that the opposing team of 11-year-olds are in tears, on the grounds that winning by over a hundred points will get his team “noticed.”



Dohrmann ranges over the AAU to show that Keller is not a unique figure. When another of Keller’s stars, Aaron Moore, is approached by another coach, his mother tells him that “whoever pays the rent is who you’re going to play for.” The other coach agrees to pay her rent, and then makes several attempts to sexually abuse Moore. Moore tells his mother, but she sends him back to the team.

Meanwhile Keller is growing rich from his players’ talents, from six-figure sponsorship deals and kickbacks from agents and college programs. Keller builds a grassroots basketball empire, setting up the “Junior Phenom” camp, encouraging parents to believe that he can turn their children into superstars. He also becomes an indispensable middleman in AAU politics in Southern California. He boasts that his swimming pool is bigger than sports marketer Sonny Vaccaro’s.

But Keller has a problem. He has been touting D as the next big thing for years, but D has stopped growing. He’s simply not tall enough to play at the highest level. He is slipping down the rankings in his age group. When Keller organizes an “All-Star” camp, D hides in the bathroom, frightened of disappointing Keller by underperforming.



Keller abandons D completely. D—still a high-schooler—sees Keller as not only a coach but a father figure. He emails and texts Keller, trying to maintain some kind of relationship, but Keller doesn’t even reply. D is heartbroken.

Keller continues to make a success of the Junior Phenom camp. D goes on to play college basketball, finding better mentors and coaches.

Play Their Hearts Out has been praised by reviewers as an “often heartbreaking, always riveting exploration of the seamy underbelly of big-time youth basketball” (New York Times).