There is an old Chinese adage that goes, “Learning is a treasure that follows the owner everywhere.” Today’s dynamic world yearns for learning, information sharing, and knowledge exchange. These are portals that prop up humanity into the future unpredictable as the future can be. Learning makes humans ready. Ready to face challenges, explore opportunities, acknowledge efforts, recognize victory, and appreciate the teamwork that breeds success. You’ve heard it said many times that no man—or woman—is an island. Learning and in this case training, embodies this saying—what one knows is not important if it is not shared.
The world over, coaches play the midwives’ role to greatness. They employ their skill, knowledge, time, and passion to transform potential into tangible possibilities. Every coach holds an important place not just in the sporting life of an individual, but also their lives outside sports. Coaches therefore must be men and women with enough understanding of their coaching discipline. Further, they must know where sports end and life begins. For there is life outside sports even though the two(sports and life) cannot be separated in literal terms.
The Basketball Experience program is founded on this understanding. To successfully birth a great sport, a great sports community, and to impact lives holistically, sports and life skills must be taught together. The two are joined at the hip—thick as thieves.
In every country of implementation, this has been the precedent set, and Kenya, the fourth and final country in the overall program, is no different. After the successful launch event in July, the next step was to gather all the coaches involved in the program for a two-week training program. First in life skills, and the final week to train them in basketball. These two sets of trainings were a joint effort by the local partners (The Kenya Red Cross & the Kenya Academy of Sports) together with NBA-Africa.
The first week focused on training the coaches on life skills. Later on, the coaches will use the training’s learning points to impart the young players with these life skills. The Basketball Experience hopes that the young players will benefit directly from this in their lives both on the courts and in life. They will be taught the benefits of co-existing peacefully, the importance of equality, how sports can help them achieve this, goal setting, planning, and good organizational skills among other crucial skills. The training curriculum recognizes that a good sportsperson and a good citizen for that matter does not just score goals and earn points, but lives harmoniously with self and others. The genesis of building that future could be this training if harnessed well into the lives of the players.
The second week “introduced the game” to the coaches. Even though some of them are already coaches and have been involved in the game for a long time, the training allowed them to learn from the best—in the game (no pun). NBA-trained professionals who have participated in the growth of basketball across continents facilitated this by exposing them to global coaching standards and skills that will help improve the competitiveness of the players once the coaching begins. With the coaches adequately prepared for the well-cut-out role, the future can only be bright for the promising young talents.
