Today's story sent to us from Antonio, is taking place during the late 1980s - early 90s!

I started playing basketball when I was 5 years old. I had way too much energy and my mum knew I had to somehow find an outlet for it. As my cousins were already playing basketball, that’s where she sent me to. I didn’t think much of it at the beginning: it was fun, just like any other sport I played back then. I was doing judo, swimming, football, volleyball, beach volley. My friends and I, when we only had a tennis ball and a stick, we’d even try to play baseball. But little by little, I started to fall in love with the game.

I grew up in an Italian island, Sardinia, where football is not as big as in other parts of Italy. In my city, Sassari, basketball was the biggest show in town, and I would often go to the games with my family. Then on Sunday morning I would watch ‘NBA Action’ on tv. Those “flying giants” captured my imagination more than anything else prior to that. To me, they were the real-life versions of a superhero like Superman. So, I started playing basket as much as possible and the more I focused on it, the more I improved my skills. I became a decent player and once I hit a growth spurt my coaches started to notice me more.

By the time I was 10/11, I had to stop playing what was called “mini-basketball” and I started playing “real” basketball, the difference being that we would not only start using official FIBA-sized baskets, but that we would treat the whole thing far more seriously. We were told that we would need to start competing, with our teammates for playing time and battle other teams for victories. For this this shift in mentality to be deeply ingrained, a new coach took over our team - coach Adriano.

Adriano was a local legend and we all had heard stories about him. He was a very well-respected coach, because he had trained the only local players who had made it to the pros, but he was also a bit eccentric and could be quite harsh. We were scared to death and quickly learnt that all the things said about him were true. He demanded focus and attention to details, making us work for countless hours on our fundamentals, repeating the same exercises again and again. We had no conditioning coach, so he would make sure we were in tip-top shape by making us run up and down the stairs of our gym. “Let’s do the “steps”” he’d say. And he would make us jump 1, 2 or 3 steps at a time on 1 or 2 legs, up and down, again and again. Try to defend without your knees bent properly and you’d be kicked out of practice. Talk while he was talking and you would be kicked out of practice. He had the utmost admiration for the Balkans. “The only real basketball is taught in Serbia and Croatia” he said. Conversely, he thought that trying to emulate NBA players was stupid. “First you need to learn the fundamentals”. So even trying to replicate “fancy” NBA moves would, once again, get you kicked out of practice. “What is that, Chinese ping-pong? That’s not basketball”!

After overcoming the initial shock, we also came to realize aside all his quirks, Adriano also had a softer side. He was a geometry teacher by profession, but it was clear that teaching basketball was his real passion. He dedicated incredible amounts of energy and time to it, basically for free. He had the keys and knew the schedule of every gym in town, so that we could always practice as many hours as we liked. If we wanted to do some extra shooting, he would come to our place to pick us up and take us to the next available gym. He had an old, run-down Fiat Panda and he would always keep a net with a dozen balls in the trunk. So, for moving around town, 3,4, sometimes 5 players had to squeeze in the passenger seats. “Stop complaining! This and That player have been in this car and they are all over 2 metres tall!”

We soon started to love Adriano as much as we loved basketball. After few years of Adriano’s teachings, we had become the best basketball team in the Island. But every time we would win our regional championship, we would soon after had to go play against bigger and better teams: Milano, Roma, Treviso. These teams all had physically and technically gifted players, a large coaching staff, gyms with beautiful floors. Before these games we would be in our locker room, legs slightly shaky, eyes to the ground, not much talking. Adriano would then come in, would look us in the eyes and say: “Go out and play your game. And remember, respect everyone, fear no one”.

Needless to say, we lost most of those games. But that doesn’t matter, because some lessons stayed with me to this day.

“Respect everyone, fear no one”.

I will try to pass that onto my kids.

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