Basketball Update

The school year is starting back up and so is the basketball season. Before looking ahead, I am looking back on two successful basketball camps. Our basketball experience so far has allowed us to combine our basketball knowledge and experience with personal development initiatives for the youth we are serving.

The Ministry of Youth and Sport, the branch of the Moroccan government who we work under, allocates certain weeks out of the year for youth camps. They can be focused around a certain project or skill, English based, art related, theater oriented, sports focused, environmentally charged, gender specific, or a combination of all. This summer we both worked one basketball camp in Essaouira and I worked one with TIBU in Casablanca.

We proposed the idea of having a basketball camp in Essaouira with our amazing Moroccan counterpart Sekkat and put together Essaouira’s first basketball camp. It was a day camp from 10-4 (but really 5 or 6) with basketball in the morning, lunch, English class and afternoon activity. The community offered their services at little to no cost including surfing, golfing, horseback riding, swimming, and carnival games. For the most part, the kids from the camp were those who attended weekly practices with one of the two basketball clubs in town (Kabir and I coach with CAS club). Next year we hope to get players who enjoy playing as well as those who have never played before.

 

 

In August, while Kabir was working in Ait Bayoud on the bridge and water project, I headed to Casablanca to work TIBU’s annual basketball summer camp at Mundiapolis University. Like I said in my last post, TIBU is such an amazing organization to work and coach alongside. The camp was a two week over night camp focusing on basketball and personal development. There were coaches from Holland, Burkina Faso, Spain, Tunisia, Senegal and Morocco volunteered their time to give the players an experience to not only learn different coaching styles but to learn about different countries and cultures. TIBU really sets itself apart in the Morocco basketball world and they just keep adopting new ideas. The campers were from ages 7-18. The days were filled with basketball sessions in the mornings and afternoons as well as language class (English, Spanish, and even some Dutch), music class, swimming, personal development sessions regarding leadership, problem solving and goal setting. I even got to teach daily yoga classes. They were a hit, mainly because the campers got to sleep at the end of each class. The nights consisted of entertainment including public speaking talk show games, karaoke, zumba and a project development simulation for the kids. The overall experience was pretty incredible for everyone involved. As TIBU continues to expand, they plan to bring in more and more youth from towns and villages where the interest of basketball is there, but the resources are not. There were a TON of photos taken by TIBU’s very own Broud Walid:

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Now that school has started, more of a routine will end itself and we will pick back up on weekend practices. After a recent meeting with the admin of the basketball club we work with in Essaouira, CAS, we proposed a monthly volunteering activity for the basketball players from our practices to be involved with. They were incredibly supportive and we are already planning a trash cleanup and special olympics day for the coming months.

-O