Macao Basketball Team Focusing on Coaching Youth Athletes with a view to Winning More Medals at the National Games
The Macao basketball team hasn't slackened a bit in 2020 since its unprecedented win at last year's Hong Kong–Macao Interport Basketball Competition. Despite a halt on training because of the Covid-19 epidemic, since the partial resumption of training in April, the Macao team has been focusing on familiarizing with tactics and developing a competition mentality with a hope of securing a second win at next year's National Games preliminary after its first win at the Games last year, and emphasizing coaching its youth basketball team and seeking to draft basketball players from a larger pool.
In alignment with Macao's guidelines on infection prevention and control of COVID-19, the Macao Men's Basketball Team partially resumed training starting from April with the number of trainees being no more than 15. The training, conducted in a non-confrontational and contactless manner, was intended for the players to gradually recover their physical strength and saw a gradual increase in technical training intensity over time without players getting injured due to overtraining. Only until this June did the basketball team go back to offense and defense trainings.
There is yet to be a timeline for the restart of local and overseas basketball matches. “Given that the Covid-19 situation remains unstable in a large number of regions, no specific match schedule has been released yet this year, and we focus on familiarizing with tactics and developing a match mentality for the time being. By so doing, we help our players to understand how the Macao team plays and get ready for future games.”said Wong Keng Long Andre, the chief coach of the team. Seeing more and more newly formed local professional teams and the Macao team members' drop-out, Wong also hopes to train more youth athletes and scout new players from a larger pool to add more flexibility to the team's line-up.
The Macao team got its first win at the National Games of the People's Republic of China by beating Tibet at last year's preliminary, and won a championship long anticipated for half a century by beating Hong Kong at last year's Interport. Wong hopes that the team will keep the ball rolling and land more wins in next year's National Games.
The drafts for the Macao Women Basketball Team and the U-16 Team in July held by the Macao Basketball Association attracted over 100 youngsters. Tee Yau, the women team's chief coach, as well as Chan Kin Pong and Lim Kean Ann, the reserve team's coaches, hope that the drafts can bring in more high-aptitude young players to expand the reserve team, and that the combination of young and experienced players can whip a women's basketball team, well-seasoned and vigorous at the same time, into being, therefore advancing Macao's women basketball and bringing the city's basketball into a higher level.
