Under-17 basketballers getting ready for Mexico

THE JAMAICA Basketball Association is preparing a 12-member male squad for the Centrobasket Under-17 Championship in Mexico, which runs from December 8-12. Jamaica’s first match will be against the hosts and national youth team coordinator, Simone Edwards, is getting them ready for the tournament.

Edwards explained that developing Jamaica’s basketball is the main objective.

“The ages range from 14 to 17 in this because it’s about development. The youth national programme, we have to start development because all the other countries, that’s the advantage they have on us right now, in terms of having development and having these kids from under 14, 15, you know, playing together going up,” Edwards noted.

“We have a player ranked number 17 in the US and he’s recruited by a lot of top schools,” she added, with reference to London Johnson, a six-foot-four point guard based in Atlanta, who was scheduled to join the group Edwards is training at the National Stadium court.

BIG OCCASION

She reckons that the match against Mexico will be a big occasion.

“It’s the first game and it’s going to be filled with Mexicans shouting on their team and they’re going to feel energetic, so we’re going in playing the host country the first game and a lot of Spanish-speaking countries are in it, which again, their advantage is that they continued to play basketball throughout,” she said, outlining the difference between how COVID-19 rules affected basketball training in Jamaica and its rivals.

The squad, which has Trevor Poyser as head coach, will be named shortly.

Edwards will not be going to Mexico, but until Poyser takes over, she will direct a training programme for the squad designed to get the players fit.

“For some of the local kids and the kids who are here, we’ve been going through some stuff and conditioning. Our drills are based on trying to get them fit. Again, they haven’t played in over a year and a half or something like that,” she reflected.

Edwards revealed that the US-based members of the squad have been active in youth club leagues and other tournaments.

She hopes also to instil the squad with a sense of national pride.

“With pride you’re going to play at a certain level, you’re going to carry yourself with certain standards, so I want them to have that first, that pride.

“The next thing I tell them is hard work and focus so those things, all the things that I follow, in terms of discipline, hard work, focus, those are the things I try to instil in all of these young men, along with that national pride,” said the woman once known in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) as the Jamaican Hurricane.

– Hubert Lawrence