Basketball · Issue No. 15
Should I Just Let My Tall 9-Year-Old Play Center?
Week of September 14, 2026
A parent wrote in: "My son is the tallest kid on his team by far, so his coach just plugs him in at center every game. Is that the smart move, or should I push back?"
Our answer: It feels obvious in the moment, but it's worth thinking through before it becomes a habit.
There are two moments that show up constantly in youth basketball, and they look like opposites. In the first, a coach looks at the tallest kid on a nine-year-old roster and hands him the ball under the basket for the rest of his career: "you're a center." In the second, a college recruiter looks at a skilled high schooler who's played guard his whole life and tells him he'll need to switch to a wing role to get a scholarship offer. Parents tend to treat these as completely different situations — one is a youth coach making a lazy call, the other is a college coach making a smart strategic one. They're actually the same mistake, pointed in opposite directions.
Both decisions substitute what a body looks like right now for what a player can actually do. The nine-year-old who's tall for his age has no idea yet whether he'll still be tall relative to his peers at sixteen — plenty of the tallest kids in elementary school end up average-sized or smaller by high school, once everyone else's growth spurt catches up. Locking him into playing with his back to the basket before he's touched a dribble teaches him nothing about ball-handling, perimeter shooting, or reading the floor — skills he may desperately need in four years if his height advantage evaporates. He's being coached for the body he has today, not the player he's becoming.
The recruiting version does the same thing from the other end. A player who's spent a decade building real point guard skills — vision, ball-handling, decision-making — gets told those skills don't matter anymore because a program needs a body at a different spot on the roster. The years of development don't disappear; they just stop being used the way they were built to be used.
The fix isn't complicated, even if it takes patience: before high school, let kids play everywhere. Guards should rebound. Big kids should bring the ball up sometimes. Every position should touch the perimeter and the paint. A kid who's genuinely learned the whole floor has options later that a kid who was typecast at eight never gets to discover he had.
From The Real Cost of Youth Basketball.
This piece ran in PPA Pro Issue No. 15, alongside a camp spotlight and trainer pick for every sport. Subscribe free.