By Victor Kanayo
Team Nigeria women Basketball will ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics, set up training camp in Ghana and United States of America.
The President of Nigeria Basketball Federation (NBBF), Musa Kida, disclosed this while speaking to Heritage Times HT on Monday.
Kida said the decision to have robust camping for the Olympics was reached after executive board meeting of the NBBF.
The Nigerian women team will have their hands full in Paris as they face Canada, Australia and France at the biggest global sporting competition.
The Nigerian opponents are top Basketball countries in the world.
Giving further breakdown of the team’s training itinerary, Kida, “it is an Olympic year -we have back to back qualification in the women’s category but unfortunately we are not able to qualify the Men’s team.
“Our biggest focus for the year is on the 2024 Paris Olympics. We are looking at three phase camping for D’Tigress starting in Nigeria then Ghana and finally the USA. We do hope that with the backing of the sports ministry and the Nigeria Olympic Committee our performance will be more outstanding than the last Olympics.”
The Olympics will take place from July 27 to August 11 in France.
He also spoke of other plans to develop Basketball at the grassroots.
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“On the local scene, our focus is on the local league. We have 8 teams per conference in the premier league with robust division one and two. We are talking to sponsor so that we can kickstart the league at appropriate time.
“On the Women’s side- the Zenith Bank Women’s League. We also have 8 teams in Savannah Conference and 8 teams in the Atlantic Conference. They will form the Elite women’s league. Already, we are interfacing with officials of Zenith Bank to have a wonderful season,” he said.
“Another priority on our programme is the Youth program. The U 21, 3X3 are been re-package for better performance.
“Also, the board have approved training, refresher courses for referees, match commissioners for 2024. They are part of our priority for the year.
“We are going to train them locally and bring top officials from FIBA to assist us in their training. We are also going to project some of them into international limelight.
“As usual, we are going to support invitational tournament.”
“We are going to end the year with our normal AGM and Awards night.”
The NBBF has been engrossed in series of controversies amidst leadership crisis in recent times.
