CRHeel94
Honored Member
- Messages
- 921
I was originally going to post this to the Random thread but I thought there's enough niche hoop junkies on here that y'all might be interested in reading this stuff.
I use to have a blog named Hoops in the Tropics that covered my basketball season in Costa Rica. Problem was that I knew some of my opposing coaches read it, so I kept things really close to the vest, til I eventually stopped doing it (and shifted to Instagram). Thought it might be fun to write and have you guys keep up with the season. Here it goes:
Last night was the first practice for my club team Escazu. The town of Escazu is a suburb to the west of San Jose, up in the mountains (about 1,300 meters of elevation). As one of the districts with highest development index, the town has both the rich (including many foreigners and ambassador residencies) as well as the not so rich who tend to live in the higher parts of town (many still work in agriculture). Our club was founded in the late 90s and has won six national titles (including four of the last six). Our club has everything from first division (where I coach) to the different age levels (U24, U21, U18, U16, U14, U12, U10, U80, including female teams in many of those age levels.
We are currently defending champs but I lost three big pieces of my rotation including our leading scorer (17.9 ppg), our starting pg (9.5 ppg) and our import center (10.5 ppg, 7.2 rpg). Still we return an important part of our core and brought back a post player who had been with us two years ago. We will bring an import player through a draft (more on that in a future post).
This season I'm emphasizing bringing players up from our minor leagues. We have won U24 three years in a row and our U21 team is pretty good. We don't do open tryouts, but I tell players if they have a talented friend, to bring them in the first couple of weeks and we will take a look. So yesterday's practice had 19 players and I'm still missing a few who had university classes on Mondays.
I'll post about league structure and format in a future post.
I use to have a blog named Hoops in the Tropics that covered my basketball season in Costa Rica. Problem was that I knew some of my opposing coaches read it, so I kept things really close to the vest, til I eventually stopped doing it (and shifted to Instagram). Thought it might be fun to write and have you guys keep up with the season. Here it goes:
Last night was the first practice for my club team Escazu. The town of Escazu is a suburb to the west of San Jose, up in the mountains (about 1,300 meters of elevation). As one of the districts with highest development index, the town has both the rich (including many foreigners and ambassador residencies) as well as the not so rich who tend to live in the higher parts of town (many still work in agriculture). Our club was founded in the late 90s and has won six national titles (including four of the last six). Our club has everything from first division (where I coach) to the different age levels (U24, U21, U18, U16, U14, U12, U10, U80, including female teams in many of those age levels.
We are currently defending champs but I lost three big pieces of my rotation including our leading scorer (17.9 ppg), our starting pg (9.5 ppg) and our import center (10.5 ppg, 7.2 rpg). Still we return an important part of our core and brought back a post player who had been with us two years ago. We will bring an import player through a draft (more on that in a future post).
This season I'm emphasizing bringing players up from our minor leagues. We have won U24 three years in a row and our U21 team is pretty good. We don't do open tryouts, but I tell players if they have a talented friend, to bring them in the first couple of weeks and we will take a look. So yesterday's practice had 19 players and I'm still missing a few who had university classes on Mondays.
I'll post about league structure and format in a future post.