Basketball on course

19

Internationally renowned Basketball Coach, Nelson Isley, continues to aid the local Basketball Federation in the development of a National Sports Structure in accordance with the mandate given him by Olympic Solidarity and the National Olympic Committee of St Vincent and the Grenadines.

Coach Isley who is in the state until 7 March 2008 submitted an Interim Report to the NOC following the conclusion of the first month’s work with the Basketball Federation. The highlights of the Report are:

"The programme got off to a very good start the first week with visits to the Georgetown primary schools where we had a good turnout of kids and the majority of the physical education teachers in those schools. We used each day to work with a different age group starting with the pre-mini and mini, moving on to the passarella group, and ending with the cadet category. I emphasized to the teachers/coaches what areas needed to be trained and gave them a number of drills/exercises that they could use to reach their goals of improving the kids sensory – perceptive abilities, motor and postural patterns, and motor abilities. At the end of the first week I was very pleased with the work done in Georgetown with the young kids and the teachers.

The second part of the program began in Calliaqua which is now considered an area of St. Vincent that has a lot of interest for the game of Basketball. Here I worked mostly with players from the local Clubs there so with them we elevated the work to more of a normal Basketball practice training session where we introduced drills for development of passing, dribbling, shooting, foot-work, and transition drills. The players worked very hard during the training sessions and the coaches I think picked up some new ideas. The only negative was that we lost 2 days of work due to the rain which is why the country desperately needs some indoor facilities.

From the 8th to the 16th of December the program had its first stop outside of St. Vincent as President Williams and I travelled to Union Island. Union Island has been known as the mecca of basketball in the past but has fallen on hard times. We had a tremendous response from the young kids there with around 30 – 40 present in each session.

This last week I was in Richland Park where we had another good turn out of young kids in the 10 – 14 age group."

There NOC is hopeful that at the conclusion of this programme the Basketball fraternity would have established a more sound developmental base from which to take its rightful place among the region’s leading basketball organisations.