Thiès, Nov 6 (APS) – Twenty young basketball coaches started a two-day training course on Tuesday in Thiès as part of a development program at the base of this sporting discipline, jointly financed by the NBA and the French Development Agency (AFD).
This capacity building session is held in the premises of Seed Academy, hosted by the National Center for Popular and Sports Education (CNEPS) of Thiès, for the benefit of coaches from Guédiawaye, in the Dakar suburbs, and Saint- Louis.
For two days, the 20 coaches – 10 men and 10 women – will be immersed in basketball and refereeing techniques and particularly in the adaptation of these skills to children’s audiences, explained Ines Ladraa, from Expertise France, an entity of the AFD group.
“The idea, according to Ines Ladraa, is to be able to teach these coaches who already have experience to adapt to a minor audience”, with children aged “from 10 to 17 years old”.
With more than 20 years of experience training young people in basketball, the Seed academy contributed to the selection of the participants in this session, who are coaches who can evolve in a school environment.
For the president of Seed Academy, Joseph Lopez, this experience means that his structure is “very well placed to manage this type of program”, falling directly in line with the vision of the academy.
Seed Academy Project, which aims to promote Senegalese and African basketball in general, opts for the development of this sport at the grassroots, said Lopez. “Everywhere in Africa, we focus on the national team and, as basketball experts, we realized that there are gaps that have not been filled from a young age,” said said the president of Seed Academy. In this regard, he welcomes the decision to restore the UASSU, these school competitions, of which he himself is a “product”.
Seed, in addition to filling the gaps noted at the base, intends to go beyond by training coaches, he said.
After the training, the 20 technical basketball coaches will run the program in the schools of Guédiawaye and Saint-Louis, in conjunction with the academies who want it. These will be sporting activities which will be held once a week, according to Ines Ladraa.
The launch of the program is scheduled for Thursday in Guédiawaye, a suburb of Dakar, during the inauguration of a basketball court renovated by the program.
The program, planned for two years in Senegal and Kenya, will help train more coaches and teachers of physical education and sports in the two cities of intervention.
Joseph Lopez pleaded for the extension of the project to other cities in Senegal. A possibility which has not been ruled out, according to the AFD representative.
Designed for four African countries, the program has already been implemented in Morocco and Nigeria, for three and four years respectively, with the participation of “thousands of children”. The second phase concerns Senegal and Kenya.
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