15 Aug 2016

 Top NBA coaches from United States of America will train 50 promising under 18 Botswana Basketball athletes in a three day camp in Gaborone. 

Under a project by Giants of Africa (GoA) a non-profit foundation founded by general manager of NBA giants Toronto Raptors Masai Ujiri, 50 basketballers and six coaches will be on camp from August 26-29. 

Speaking at the project launch,QuesS Captial LLC project director,  Pallab Sarkar said the camp serves as a long term preparations for their aspirations of building a team to compete in the 2024 Olympics.

Sarkar said even though one camp might not be enough, the idea was to try and build on the foundation laid by the camp.

He said the idea behind involving six local national coaches was to accord them a chance to acquire techniques and drills from the NBA experienced coaches so that they could later impart the knowledge to their players at club level.

Sarkar explained that since basketball was one of the fastest growing sports in the world and very much popular in North America, many leading institutions in North America were willing to invest in talent from Africa by providing scholarships.

However, he said this would be based on the commitment of players who would take the sport seriously.

“This is a global event, it involves participation from other 10 countries and this will put Botswana on the world stage,” he said.

For his part, Botswana Basketball Assocaition (BBA) technical director, Mothusi Thipe who was involved with the team selection said they considered the height of the player.

“Height was a special consideration for this camp, we used height between 1.60 and 1.87 metres for the shortest guys and the tallest players in the camp was 2.7 metres,” he said.

Thipe said ‘basketball is a game of tall people’ hence the need to select the tallest players countrywide. 

He said they dispatched a three-man technical team to travel around the country, putting more emphasis on the northern part of the country where most of guys were ga bit taller. He further said BISA was also engaged to assist in identifying talented players who meet the requirements.

The six coaches were selected from Tonota, Maun, Lentsweletau, Bobonong, Mochudi and Mmadinare. ENDS