Former national basketball player turned coach Lugard Mohan is downplaying talks about moving on to being Guyana’s next national coach after leading his club Dyna’s Ravens to the Next Level Entertainment (NLE) basketball title last weekend.
Mohan, a two-time Caribbean All–star player, said that Guyana already has a national coach in Bobby Codogan but as far as his coaching goes, he will stick to his club level and Georgetown.
“Recently, everyone around basketball has been asking if I would go on to coach the national team and every time I would say no. So now I would publicly say that I have no intentions moving on to coach the national team because they already have a good coach in Bobby Codogan,” said Mohan.
He said also that he has done some work with both the Georgetown juniors and seniors side in several competitions and that’s as far as his coaching will go.
Meanwhile, reflecting on his team’s performance in the NLE tournament Lugard said that while many persons congratulated him for his role as a coach, all the praises should be going to the players who simply made his job on the sidelines easier.
“I think that people should really give credit to my players because they made my work so much easy and the fact that they understand me so well they know what I want. It was also the maturity of Darcell Harris, Kevin Lawrence and Rudy James for example that was also a factor since they all understand me well and would know what I am looking for,” said the former national player. Mohan said that he was not worried about his team’s poor start in the tournament since such things do happen in the sport. However, he was extremely high in praise of his team’s performance against the Kashif and Shanghai Kings in the semi-finals and after that he figured it would have been smooth sailing.
“Entering the tournament we knew that once the Kings got past Pacesetters we would play them and after beating them the tournament would be ours for the taking.”
After holding his tongue about his game plan for the final against the Royals, Mohan said that his plan was to allow the Royals point guard Anson Durant to do all the scoring and keep their danger player Dwayne “Brown Sugar” Roberts off the ball as much as possible.
“Going into the Royals game I knew that it would have been easy for us because myself and my players all knew that Dwayne (Roberts) whom I also coached for some time was the danger man on the court. Why you think the point guard scored so many points (18)? It’s because I had my slowest man Kevin Lawrence marking him and I had Damien Liverpooland Ryan Gullen playing tight at the bottom.”But Mohan said that Roberts was able to still put some numbers which shows how good a player he is but he Roberts scored most of his 18 points in the finals from the free throw line.
Since his club was established in 1954 Mohan said that they were always a threat in every tournament and it didn’t matter who the other top teams were around the country, people were always rooting for the Ravens.
The coach thanked his sponsors Dyna’s Embroidery for their continued support over the years and said that they were looking forward to working with the company in the future.
“I think they also have a part to play in our success too because everything we ask for they provide. They pay the rent for us at the Cliff Anderson Sports Hall, they take care of our water and uniforms and so on, and the only way we can repay them is by winning,” said Mohan.