National player Marie Bertholdt (left) has recently started playing successfully for Alba Berlin.
Foto: imago/camera4+
After six years in tranquil Marburg, Marie Bertholdt was looking for a new challenge. In Hesse she matured into a national basketball player, became captain of the Bundesliga team and even the best German point collector in the DBBL. But she apparently couldn’t foresee further developments, as BC Marburg hadn’t even reached the playoffs. So she changed clubs. But they weren’t drawn to a finalist, but to a club that had only been playing in the women’s Bundesliga for a year. And the reasoning is even more astonishing: “If you want to improve in German basketball, Alba Berlin is the perfect address for it. The association offers the support and has the necessary structures. It was very clear to me that I could improve here personally, but also as a team player,” Bertholdt reflects. In fact, the men’s series champion Alba Berlin has also managed to become one of the most popular clubs among women in a very short time.
This now also applies to sports. The newcomers surprisingly managed to reach the semi-finals last season. At the start of the new one, coach Cristo Cabrera was happy about an even better start: five wins from six games mean second place in the table. And this Saturday is the top game with the still unbeaten champions from Keltern. Alba is no longer without a chance.
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To achieve this, the club has invested money and invested four years of continuous development work into its women’s team since it decided to offer girls and young women a better perspective in basketball instead of just being cheerleaders at men’s games. These were abolished in 2019. Since then, Alba’s women have been promoted to the Bundesliga and are now playing at the top. “Even though Alba was a newcomer last year, the club has been saying for many years that it wants to tackle women’s basketball the right way,” Bertholdt told “nd”. »Over the years he has created structures to ensure that things run smoothly in the Bundesliga. It worked immediately and we can even build on it.”
Of course, the structures mentioned by the winger did not grow out of nothing. In many areas, the women benefit from what the club has built up for the men over decades: both teams now train in the same hall, even if male youth teams had to move to accommodate this. They also rely on the same staff for individual training and performance diagnoses. »Of course we benefit from the men’s team. But putting a special focus on women is still something very special. We have our own full-time coaches, athletic trainers and physical therapists who are there all the time to make each player better and keep them healthy,” reports Bertholdt.
»That was the biggest push we could give our women’s team. The synergies help us a lot,” says sports director Himar Ojeda, who is responsible for both teams and now sits in the stands at all women’s home games in the Sömmeringhalle. The completely luxury-free arena in Charlottenburg, where Alba’s men once staged their games in the early years before they moved to the Max Schmeling Hall and later to the modern multifunctional temple at the Ostbahnhof, has become the women’s home for over a year. And they love it there. In the 2nd league they played in a better training hall, where there was little more than friends and family on the sidelines to watch.
In order to draw more attention to the women’s team, double game days were initially held with the men in their large arena. “We don’t even talk about that anymore today,” reports Ojeda in the nd interview. »Even during normal Bundesliga games, the Sömmeringhalle is three quarters full. I didn’t expect that so quickly.” In fact, a solid fan base has formed around the women’s team. Fewer people in suits, but more children and women sit on the hard benches here. The 1000 limit is almost always broken. The average was 1,661 last season. No club in the DBBL currently comes close to that, and most other arenas don’t even hold that many spectators.
But one thing is also clear: the women’s team is not yet financially self-sustaining. Alba is pumping a lot of resources into the project without publicly creating any pressure that something has to change in the medium term. First of all, further investments should be made. “I can imagine that Alba will introduce her own sports director for the women’s area at some point, because it’s a lot of work for me,” says Himar Ojeda. “But we first wanted to grow organically from below, so we invested in coaches, physiotherapists, doctors and of course the development of the players.”
Because the club can compensate for losses in other ways, Alba has a competitive advantage. Pure women’s clubs like those in Marburg or Keltern have to save money in other areas in order to put together a good team. »The players who move to us rave about our away trips because we always make sure to arrive early so that everyone can eat something and rest before the game starts. If kick-off is too early for that, we go there the day before and take a hotel. It’s the same when a game ends too late. This makes us unique,” says sports director Ojeda.
Even though almost half of the team now works as full professionals, this is still far from the rule. The term professional is also a bit misleading. »Most people do something on the side. I also studied in Marburg,” says Marie Bertholdt. She could live on the salary at Alba, but it wasn’t enough for the time after her career. So it is mandatory to prepare for your professional life in addition to sport. “There’s still a lot of room for improvement if you compare it with other sports or men.”
Other countries like Spain and Turkey are far ahead of German basketball here. Alba Berlin cannot yet keep up with the salary structures there, which is why only four of the current German national players are active in the Bundesliga. None of them are regulars in the German Basketball Association team. Alba at least has the ambition to bring her own offspring there at some point. »We could definitely afford players who are currently at a higher level. But that’s not Alba’s philosophy. We want to develop young basketball players to this level ourselves,” says Ojeda. The approach of continuity ultimately led to sporting success for men for years.
For women it happened even faster. There are no stars among the Berlin women. The team impresses in the typical Alba style with a versatile attack, the burden of which is distributed across many shoulders, and a strong defense. In the home wins against Freiburg last Sunday and against newly promoted Leverkusen (Wednesday) alone, Alba pulled away in the third quarter when they only allowed their opponents to collect eight and seven points in ten minutes each. “If we focus on defense, and we did that again in these quarters, then our offense also benefits from it,” says Berthold, analyzing her new team’s recipe for success. This Saturday we will be testing in Keltern whether the German champions also like it.
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