MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Are kids really playing enough basketball games today?

West Virginia coaches Ross Hodge and Mark Kellogg believe they probably are, but not the way many of us were accustomed to playing 20, 30 or 40 years ago. Back then, you couldn't find a park anywhere that wasn't full of players on a sunny Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

In the small town I grew up in West Virginia, games were played from noon until sunset. You picked the teams. You made up the rules and you settled disputes, sometimes with your fists if you had to.

Pickup basketball in the Mountain State really grew out of the successes West Virginia University had playing in the National Invitation Tournaments in the 1940s. Soon after coach Dyke Raese's Mountaineers won the NIT in 1942, kids everywhere were nailing hoops to Sycamore trees in their backyards, to barns, or finding deserted streets and attaching baskets to telephone poles, as Bob Clousson once did when he was growing up in Clarksburg in the early 1950s.

"Somebody donated half of a ping-pong table for the backboard, and we hoisted that thing up on a telephone pole," he once recalled. "Saturday morning was our big day, and we would be out there at 7 o'clock and made sure nobody was parked underneath it so we could play all day.

"If somebody did park there, we were mad, and we played anyway and just bounced the ball off their car hood," he said.

It was said that Jerry West played so incessantly as a child growing up in southern West Virginia that he had to take vitamin shots for nutrition, and a basket that he practiced on near his house was next to a hill, and whenever a shot was missed, the ball rolled all the way down into a deep gully.

His solution to the predicament was to quit missing.

Guard Hot Rod Hundley said playing basketball games all day long at the Charleston YMCA in the late 1940s literally saved his life.

"I remember going to the Y and you couldn't even get on the floor," he said. "You played winners stay up, and there would be a line of guys waiting to play. If you lost, you wouldn't play again for an hour or longer. We played to 20 points and then the game was over. You had to write your name on the board for your team. (Years later) you could shoot a cannon through there because there wasn't a soul there."

Today, kids play AAU games or games in managed settings, but Kellogg is not sure if many of them are capable of arranging their own games or picking their own teams.

"They play too much organized basketball," he explains. "Back in our generation, we just went out and played pickup games. I don't know if our kids even know how to organize a pickup game if somebody doesn't help them and tell them what to do and how to get going when you used to go outside and just played. 

"If you lost, you may sit for 30 minutes because there were that many people waiting to play, so I think we've lost some of that along the way," he said.

Hodge agrees.

"When I was playing not that long ago, you played more," he opined. "You didn't work out as much. You played. If you were going back to the gym at night, you were going to play one-on-one, two-on-two or three-on-three and weren't kind of working on a specific skill.

"I think the difference is now they play so much, but in a controlled environment," West Virginia's first-year coach explained. "If you are playing AAU, immediately that coach is going to try and win, so he's going to try and figure out how to win with that team, and they are going to be very specific with what each player is doing to try and help that team win, as opposed to kind of organically getting together and learning how to play basketball going to like a park or a recreation center like we did."

Kellogg says there is an exploration process that is lost on today's players because the games they are playing are typically arranged for them.

"They need to play games, and organized is perfectly fine, but also just go out and explore and make up your rules and find your teams, 'Okay, we've got three post players on our team, let's figure out how to play with them.' Or maybe another team doesn't have size for this game and those are the things we used to do on our own because your first five that made (free throws or 3-point shots), that was your team," he said. "You didn't know who it was going to be, but other times, you might roll in with your complete group of five that you wanted to play with."

There was a certain meritocracy to those old-school pickup games. If you made an open shot, you likely got the ball again. If you missed it, then you better go crash the boards and earn some respect.

Not everyone got to play, and if you wanted to keep playing, you better figure out how to win with the players you have.

Houston coach Kelvin Sampson believes many of today's players are being trained to "work basketball" instead of simply playing basketball.

"Sometimes you need to get somebody and go play against somebody and see if you can guard them," he said in a video clip that went viral on social media this summer. "When you are playing one-on-zero who are you guarding? And who is guarding you? Can you handle pressure? Can you work on going left or right against pressure? The thing I would tell kids coming up is spend more time playing basketball than working on basketball."

"Not that long ago, you were playing pickup games in the recs, parks or open gyms at the high school and you called next," Hodge said. "When it was your time, you picked who you thought could win and you just didn't get to play because you should get to play. You actually had to earn your right onto it. There's a balance and a ying and a yang to everything; good and bad.

"More often than not, nowadays, when players get into the gym, they are getting into it to work on a specific skill as opposed to just playing the game itself."

Kellogg says there is great value in individual skill development, as long as it applies to the team setting. He used the European model as an example.

"We practice very little now at the youth level, and then they go play five games on a weekend and maybe have a practice in between, instead of the European model, which is the complete opposite," he said. "They practice three, four or five times a week to play one game. We wonder why the skill levels on the collegiate and the professional level are with the more international-type players, so I think we need to find a balance here. 

"Because we play so many games, at times, the winning and losing doesn't mean quite as much. 'If we're going to lose at 9 a.m., that's okay because we've got another game at 4 o'clock.' When you only play once a week, winning and losing seems to be a little bit different," he added.

"As a coach, you want them to be in the gym and you want them to work on their skillsets and a lot of them have trainers, and there are great qualities to all of that, but you want them to make sure it carries over into live action," Kellogg said. "Are we working on things that will help you when you come to play for us at West Virginia?"

In the final analysis, Hodge believes the games are when players and coaches really learn about themselves and their teams.

"Until you actually get out there and put your entire group together and play another group … you can get better, and you can learn what you're trying to do, but you have to play other people before you really, really figure your team out," he concluded.