The Inter-Guiana Games (IGG) men’s basketball team will be somewhat upgraded for the 2012 edition in French Guiana as star guards Dominic Vincente and Nikkoloi Smith left last Thursday for a High Performance Training Camp in Suriname.
The camp will see 40 athletes from countries such as Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados participating.
According to Chris Bowman, organiser of the Youth Basketball Guyana (YBG) programme, Guyana was able to send two athletes because of the persistence of Director of Sport, Neil Kumar.
The camp will be held over the weekend and Smith and Vincente will return on Monday. The camp is to be conducted by American college coaches.
With Suriname being the 2011 victors in the IGG basketball competition, the camp will definitely help the two Guyanese to gain some much needed exposure and experience especially when they play Suriname later in the year at the IGG. Bowman, who coached both players, believes that not only will the high intensity camp help both players to improve their own games but it will also help the team.
“It will help the both of them personally; they would not have been exposed to this type of high level training before with coaches from America, so I think it will do well for their individual games.
“They will also be mixing skill sets with the best players in Suriname so they should have a good feel of the players they will come up against later this year in the IGG and hopefully they will carry the mentality and intensity into our training… so I believe that it’s a tremendous opportunity for them,” Bowman told Stabroek Sport.
Further with Kwakwani guard Dominique Douglas having some exposure to competition in Antigua coupled with the exposure both Smith and Vincente will receive, Bowman believes that the team will do well with the players being granted these opportunities to develop themselves.
“With Dominique Douglas of Kwakwani recently having some exposure in Antigua and now Smith and Vincente being exposed in Suriname, it’s all about these young players getting the exposure to develop and it will only help the team when IGG rolls around,” Bowman related.
With the impact of Guyana’s junior guards expected to have a positive spinoff on the Guyanese junior national squad, Bowman applauded the National Sports Commission (NSC) and Kumar for ensuring that not just one player got the opportunity to go but two.
“Well it was suppose to be one player initially from Guyana, Barbados and Trinidad but Kumar pushed for two and got it. It is not something he had to do because it is the association’s job to get athletes in these programmes but he did and I want to applaud the NSC and Kumar for their persistence in setting everything up which is fully sponsored by them and the Surinamese government,” Bowman highlighted.
Meanwhile with the Cliff Anderson Sports Hall (CASH) being on lockdown due to a technology fair, Bowman said that the IGG training camp is expected to start by next weekend as the YBG is currently negotiating with the NSC to get the camp underway.
However, so far the only confirmed players for the 2012 IGG Guyanese team are Douglas, Vincente and Smith while the rest of the team will be decided on during the coming week before the training camp starts.
