If you want to be the best you you can be in basketball and as a person, then Empower Me is great for you. They make you a great person, as well as a positive person and who encourages others. Empower Me also makes you feel comfortable being uncomfortable. In other words that means being comfortable while messing up or while something is hard.

AAU stands for Amateur Athletic Union, and that is basically competitive or a year round travel basketball team. You have a tournament almost every weekend. Empower Me Academy is not an AAU team. The main Empower Me coach only wants you to be a leader on a team you play for and to be the best you you can be.

In Empower Me you have to always be positive and care for your teammates. Even in stretching. You have to enter the gym clapping and positive. The coaches are ask for more than AAU coaches. In EMA they always want you to encourage, keep your head up, and have confidence. You can build you skill level in the fundamentals. AAU, on the other hand, is good for learning to actually play the game. I think I have gotten better through Empower Me after doing it for three months.

Empower Me Academy is a place where you practice and do drills which is very helpful for people who really want to have confidence in their game. First there is an assessment so the coaches can see what level you’re at. They might say to do ten layups with your right hand and then the left. Then you’ll dribble between your legs and layup. There is a sequence like that. Another skill is ball handling, such as two-ball stuff. At the end of practice you do form shot. I learned how to keep my arm in rather than stick it out, in my form shot. I’ve also improved my ball handling, including two ball dribbling, the spin move, and pump fakes.

There are some important reasons you should do Empower me Academy instead of Bay City, or any other AAU team. First, Bay City’s website is not as detailed as Empower Me’s.. If I were a parent that looked at the Bay City website and clicked “About Us,” I would be really confused because they only had a few sentences. But the Empower Me website is much clearer with a lot of sections on the program and a lot more videos. The Bay City program is only showing them playing in the games, and they don’t show what they do in practice. An interesting fact from the Empower Me website is that they offer evaluation, privates, and courses on how they train kids.

I have been affected by this program because I have encouraged people a lot more than I used to and I have been a more positive person. For example, someone in my class was not one hundred percent sure on a question and he didn’t want to answer the question in front of the group. I started to encourage him and he did it. I’ve learned that when one person starts encouraging, it’s contagious so after I encouraged him my whole group started to encourage him. You don’t always have to encourage people in sports you can encourage even in school.

As you can see, Empower Me basketball program does a lot things differently than the Bay City basketball program. With a perspective, I’m Elizabeth.