Luka Dončić and the lost joy of youth basketball

Luka Dončić’s mission to help restore joy in youth basketball hits home. 

As a 25-year-old, Luka Dončić has felt more pressure than most people experience in a lifetime. At the same time, he plays with this contagious joy of the game, an almost childish exuberant approach.

This joy of Luka Dončić is a big reason why he is so interesting to watch. He has managed to hold on to the feeling that millions of kids have when they walk onto the court. The pure joy of basketball.

But reality is that many of those kids lose their joy of the game along the way to mounting pressures. That fact hasn’t escaped Luka Dončić’s attention, and with the The Luka Dončić Foundation he just launched a new initiative called “The All Hoops Approach”.

“Kids are walking away from youth basketball because we’ve replaced joy with pressure. When we treat young players like pros, we lose the friendship, growth and fun that make sports special. This has to change,” Luka Dončić said in connection with the launch.

The first step was to publish a 200 page investigation called “Inside Youth Basketball”, which took five months to complete, interviewing hundreds of youth players, coaches and parents in both the Balkans and the US.

And the findings were similar in both places. Youth basketball needs help. From the introduction to the study:

“The same warning signs kept appearing: increasing burnout rates, significant financial barriers to entry, undertrained coaches, and a “Highlight Culture” that prioritizes individual viral moments over team development.

The very things that make basketball transformative for young people — teamwork, resilience, belonging — are being overshadowed by adult ambitions and performance pressure. Parents are stressed about rising costs and intense schedules. Coaches feel compelled to win at all costs rather than foster growth. And kids are losing their childhood on the court, treating basketball like a job before they’re even teenagers.”

The study found similar issues with youth basketball on both continents and proposed a solution and a path to get there through eight principles.

“Working with the Jr. NBA, FIBA, and a global alliance of youth basketball organizations, we’re integrating the Total Hoops Approach into programs worldwide. Starting in 2025, these principles will be implemented in camps and clinics across multiple continents, creating a testing ground for our vision of youth basketball’s future.”

This investigation is a real look into what’s going on in youth basketball in both areas. The foundation talked to hundreds of people in an earnest effort to find the real problems and solutions. This is worth mentioning, because for an athlete’s foundation, the work put into this does more than just scratch the surface. It uses experts’ voices as well as experienced players’ and coaches’ thoughts to analyze the state of youth basketball with the help of comments by the kids in the Balkans and the US.

The foundation found a real problem in youth basketball and then came up with a real way to improve it. This study is both comprehensive and moving in its approach. I read through it all, and I recommend anyone interested in coaching, youth basketball and basketball cultures to do, so as well.

The result is remarkable. The pages are scattered with pictures of kids and their stories, as well as comments, letters and quotes by players and coaches from both the Balkans and the US, all of them moving and eye-opening. Like this one, form a coach in the US: “Even professionals take a break, but these are kids playing more basketball than NBA players.”

Or this one from a kid in Slovenia: “When I played pickup with my friends I felt free. I don’t know how to explain it but, like, on the court everything melts away.”

This investigation consists of so many personal stories, and the mission to help kids hold on to their joy really hits home for me, as well. In the past, I have shared how I lost my joy of basketball as a young adult, when the pressures became too heavy. In the piece “How Luka restored my sanity and brought me back to my first love” from 2022, I talk about just that.

This topic is deeply personal to me. But as I have found out, this story is more common than I realized. People from all over the world reached out and told me about similar experiences, just like this investigation uncovers. My story is just one of many.

At 12, basketball became my life. That’s the time when my coach, who taught me almost everything I know about the game, took over our team. From that point on, I felt like I was finally taken seriously.

That was a gift of a lifetime. Without basketball, my teammates, my club and this coach, I never would have learned the life skills and lessons that basketball can teach you, and I never would have been introduced to the amazing world and culture of this sport, which continues to give me joy to this day.

At 12, I showed up three – then four times a week for practice, keen to learn and fully locked in from start to finish. Remember, this is in Europe, where teams are not connected to schools but to clubs, and so most days after school I made my way on my bike to the local club.

Consisting of three courts next to each other, small stands on the sideline and a-sometimes-open kiosk, this place became my life and the people there became my friends. I would stay after practice to watch the senior elite teams practice, watch them run drills and copy their moves and shooting form.

I would pay attention to the team dynamics – who didn’t like each other and who played the best together, and I would have a running commentary on my research as I sat ready to watch their games on the weekends.

As my coach taught us how to eat right, strength train, stretch, read the game, how to act during pressure – and practice to get the most out of it, while teaching us all the fundamentals, I grew. Mentally and physically.

My physicality has always been to my advantage. When you’re one of the tallest and strongest players on a team and at the same time a sharpshooter, things open up for you.

And as we started to win, tournaments and then a championship, we also lost a lot. In order to win, you have to learn how to lose. It was mostly cup finals, but it taught me a lot about overcoming adversity. I have so many silver medals at home, it’s not even funny.

Being in such high-pressure situations so often has taught me an enormous amount of things. Fighting through hardship. How to act under pressure. Poise. Leadership skills.

It’s skills I use to this day, managing people, maneuvering life, like any other human being. When you’ve learned the skills of managing adversity early on, you know how to deal with them just a little better as an adult.

As time passed, I was selected to the u18 national team, and my coach became someone else’s coach after almost four years. There wasn’t another coach as competent who was able to take over, and the joy slowly left me. Day by day of lacking high-level coaching, I could feel the motivation and joy seeping out of me. On top of that, an experience with the national team stuck with me. During a game, a girl was taken out and yelled at so much that she started crying. I was asked if I could do better. I said yes (don’t know where I got the courage) and I did. I won ‘Best Player’ in that game.

But that was not having fun, there was nothing joyful about that experience. That was adults putting their adult expectations on kids. I wish I had been reminded to have fun. Then I may not have left the sport with a broken heart, as I wrote in the original piece.

I needed help and guidance, and I didn’t get it. I was all alone in a world of suddenly sharp elbows. As a 17 year old, I thought I was too weak for the game. Too weak to keep my joy and motivation. It seemed like a test, and I wasn’t passing it.

Going to school full time, practicing every day and being forced to have a job on the side to make some kind of money was pressuring me in more than one way. Because of my discipline, another skill I learned in basketball, I kept going for around a year or two. Burnout, as Luka Dončić and the foundation calls it, is the right word. The European version.

The joy was gone. I quit and my heart was broken. But the thing is, basketball had given me some of the most important skills in my life, and friendships and memories I would never forget. And basketball had given me joy. That pure, unadulterated joy, which you see Luka Dončić displaying so often, I had that joy once. What a blessing.

After years of pretending basketball was not a thing for me, I returned to this world. I started watching the NBA and I started following my old club. Then I started writing, a journey I’m still on, which has given me much of the same youthful joy I once felt while playing. I now feel it writing about, analyzing and commenting on basketball. And I started coaching u9 girls, trying to give them the confidence, courage and joy I lost along the way.

But as I grow older and wiser, more reflective anyway, I realize that less and less kids have this experience. In my country, more kids than ever play basketball and waiting lists can be long, but what are the chances that they continue past their early teens – if they even get a spot? Access to good coaching is sparse, costs are increasing. And all over the world, access to sports and basketball is so limited that most kids don’t even get the chance to experience the joy of team sports to begin with.

Basketball especially has a potential to inspire and motivate children, who usually would sit in front of the screen these days, while loneliness is spreading like wildfire across the world as we see less and less people in real life. In Luka Dončić’s words:

“I think a lot about my daughter and young people around the world and the opportunities they have. Do they have the same access to basketball – to joy – that I had? I am worried that they don’t.”

While Luka Dončić and his foundation is working to improve real life problems in youth basketball around the world, there is something we all can do: Remind kids around you to have fun. Encourage the joy and help them maneuver the pressure. Then maybe, eventually, we can prevent the next generation from leaving the sport with a broken heart.

Find more Beyond Basketball pieces here.