“I don’t have a magic wand,” he said yesterday Diego Epifanio in his presentation as the new coach of the Leyma Coruña. After years in which the club sold from minute zero the speech of going up to the ACB, it seems that for the next season he prefers to take the path of prudence. Not because of ambition, which remains the same and in fact, the club has acquired the services of a coach who already comes with two promotions under the armone with Burgos and another with Breogán – albeit with Students failed to lose against Girona—. But yes because of the difficulty of the objective in an increasingly competitive LEB Oro. There have to be many conditions for the final success, so the important thing is to focus on what depends on oneself, such as “improving and growing” both in the sporting and social aspects, trying to “do the best project possible” and then ” work will put everyone in their place”.
With almost two months to go before the preseason starts on September 1, there is still a lot to do, but the coach from Burgos has already been settled in the city for a few days and working side by side with those who will be his assistants, Roman Gomez and Carlos Penedo, who repeat the same as the rest of the staff and to those who are already giving “war”: “I’m asking you for things at any time”. But it is part of what he liked about the club and why he decided to accept the offer. “I think he has good skills to achieve the goals he sets for himself,” he said. “I had already seen that it is a club that has been improving year after year, very seriously and the exes have always spoken very well to me”, he continued. “We have to improve and grow as much as we can to be a top club in the league.which is the path we are on, not only in sports”.
There were no allusions to the ACB. “There is a process,” Epifanio said. “We have to do the best sports project we can and it is clear that it is not going to be because of enthusiasm and work. But the competition is going to be very complicated with three former ACBs who are also economically very strong. Us we will have to make a great effort to compete against them”, he insisted. His experience makes him cautious: “In Burgos we went up four times in five years to achieve it… and I am convinced that in the future Leyma will have the option of achieving it”.
“The most important thing is the locker room,” he added about the keys that can lead to success, “and right now we are with a blank sheet of paper seeing which players fit best into our schemes.” It is one of the reasons why the orange directive chose him to command the new project. “We look at his ability to manage mid-high level players,” he said. Roberto Cibeira, president of Leyma, “also that he is a good connoisseur of the league, that his teams are always competitive and that he shares our values”. “We’re all going to do everything possible,” Epifanio summed up, “and all of that may make us competitive.” “Hopefully we reach 100 points in all the games and they don’t score more than 60. Basketball sometimes makes a basket make us very happy or very sad. The important thing is that we row in the same direction and that those who come to the Palace enjoy themselves”, he concluded.
A budget for the first time in excess of one million euros
Leyma will raise its budget for the LEB Oro team to over a million euros for the first time in its history, as revealed yesterday at the press conference to present Diego Epifanio, the new orange coach, the president Roberto Cibeira. “Last year we were already above 900,000 euros and this year we are going to be above one million euros. We had never been in these figures”, pointed out the president, who was grateful that so much Leyma as Estrella Galiciatwo major sponsors, keep up your support, same as Ibereolica and Caixabank. “And we are quite advanced in conversations with the Deputation”, added Cibeira, an important fact because the club did not have the support of this institution for the last three years.
Atoumane Diagne, first piece
Diego Epifanio works on setting up the squad for the next season. And he already has the first piece of Leyma 2022-23: Atoumane Diagne. The Senegalese center was one of the players for whom the club had a renewal clause and the two parties agreed on his continuity given his great performance. In addition, there is practically an agreement with Alex Hernandez, although not signed, so that he can finish recovering from his injury in A Coruña and continue with the team. They won’t even Abdou Thiamwith whom an agreement was reached for his dismissal, nor Johan Lofberg, who exercised his exit option. Either Mo Soluade, who will go to England. He is still trading and is not ruled out Zach Monaghanthe same as Javier Vega y August Peciukevicius, which Diego Epifanio already directed in Burgos. “The idea is to have ten competitive players, two per position,” said the coach, “and another two who are clear that they have to win every minute, who help us in training and we help them in their training.” In this sense, the vice president Juan Carlos Fernandezvice president, clarified that these will be players of the Xiria and of one’s own quarry of the club.
