Grace Stone

Earning Our Stripes is proud to present Baller Grace Stone! Grace and the Princeton Women’s basketball team are currently going dancing at the 2022 NCAA tournament where they upset University of Kentucky to make it into round two. In this episode we discussed the ways in which AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) basketball informs the college recruiting process, and by extension the lives of thousands of young girls whose futures depend on the sport of basketball. Grace is a fantastic person with so many amazing insights, get listening!

What we Talked About and Why it Matters

Grace was a pro in the recording booth. We experienced minor technical difficulties to start, but she rode them out like a pro, helping me to fix the system so we could record something other than background noise. Once we got going our conversation focused on the impact that college recruiting has on youth basketball. Being a basketball player taught Grace from a young age that adults in the basketball system were invested in the act of recruitment, and that monetary offers in the form of scholarship were on the line if she and other junior level ballers performed well in front of those adults. This reality exists because basketball is a spectacle. The sport takes players and makes them superstars. As Debord put it, and as I have already quoted in this paper: “The commodity is this illusion, which is in fact real, and the spectacle is its most general form.” (Debord 1994, 32) The way in which Grace described the dependency that the youth-college basketball journey constructs for people in disadvantaged areas reveals the direct application of the word commodity in relation to the time and effort athletes put into performing and facilitating that spectacle.

The commodity is not the athlete themselves but all of the work behind the scenes that it has taken to get the athlete to the position in which they can turn the heads of coaches and crowds alike. Grace is not my only guest to describe being a student athlete as feeling like you have two jobs to contend with at Princeton, and her perspective is one that helps me to think of the demands of the spectacle that force an athletes body to be the vehicle through which athletic commodification is obtained. Grace was also the person who left me with the most poignant quote of any of the interviewees across the series; “ Frankly, futures are determined by whether a coach comes to an AAU game.” These words hit me harder than I even realised at the time, as ever since we recorded together I find myself thinking back and fretting over the countless young people whose work was in vain, and futures in jeopardy because of their performances going unremarked upon.

Sources

Debord, Guy. 1994. “The Commodity as Spectacle.” In The Society of the Spectacle, 25–34. translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Zone Books, 1994. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1453m69.5