Watching this middle school game and seeing a team just sit in a zone and rebound. They may win tonight but they are in no way helping out their Varsity program. Maybe I’m old school, but seeing middle school coaches refuse to play man to man defense is a pet peeve of mine.

I coached boys and girls in middle school and I'm with you 100% -- you should teach your kids to defend.  To help.  To talk.  To shade.  NOT to sit in a zone, even when active, and play an area.  I couldn't possibly agree with you more strongly than I do.

Nothing wrong with mixing it in a little bit during middle school, but you need to understand man-to-man defense before playing zone.  The issue at the middle school level is that you have many coaches that have no clue what they are doing, so playing zone is easy for them, even though the zone is played incorrectly 95% of the time.  Now playing zone at the elementary school level is just stupid.  A couple years ago, my son's (4th grade) AAU team played a team down in Lexington that packed in a tight 2-3 zone because kids that age can't consistently hit deep jumpers.  The other team was a year older, so they were just way more athletic than our team.  Towards the end of the game, they had built a comfortable lead and went man.  We scored every time down the floor as they had no clue how to play a man defense.  They were completely lost, and it was sad as a team that good offensively and athletically couldn't play a lick of man defense.