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Basketball Association to form U-14 squad

SINGAPORE — Over the past six weeks, the Basketball Association of Singapore (BAS) had the opportunity to observe some of the country’s budding talents in action as they trained under the inaugural Junior NBA Singapore Programme.

SINGAPORE — Over the past six weeks, the Basketball Association of Singapore (BAS) had the opportunity to observe some of the country’s budding talents in action as they trained under the inaugural Junior NBA Singapore Programme.

The programme, which culminated in a three-day national training camp for 200 boys and girls aged 10 to 14, officially ended yesterday as 10 boys and five girls were selected to join the Junior NBA Singapore All-Stars team.

The chosen ones will now go on to participate in an overseas training camp with their counterparts from Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines later in the year.

However, this does not mean the end of the journey for those not selected in the all-star team.

Having seen the huge potential demonstrated by the Junior NBA participants, the BAS told TODAY they will work with progamme partners Sport Singapore (SportSG) and ActiveSG to retain these young players and groom them into future national basketballers.

“I’m very excited with the talent that we’ve seen in the programme, as a lot of them have demonstrated great skill and tenacity and there’s definitely a lot of potential in many of these players,” BAS honorary-secretary Ong Swee Teck told TODAY.

“So it is important that we work with SportSG to continue to have a database of all these players.

“We want to keep these players, develop them and if they do well, we’ll definitely move them up the ladder of our national age-group teams as they grow older.”

National coach Frank Arsego agreed.

“Some potential talents have already been identified in the Junior NBA process, which is good. But there are also a lot of other players with potential who didn’t get the opportunity to make the top 10,” he said.

“A lot of these players might not realise their talent and potential next year, or even the year after, but somewhere down the track hopefully if they keep working hard, they can become successful players.”

To prevent these potential stars from slipping through the cracks, the BAS revealed that they are exploring bringing together the best young talents from the programme, as well as from those in the national schools competition, to form a national under-14 squad.

“We’ll start in some sort of format in identifying these players and bringing them together as a group,” said Arsego.

“It will be a pool — we won’t hone in on something specific — and I would call it some sort of national squad, potentially for the under-14s. At the moment, we’ve just got to do a bit of work to tidy up the U-14 space, and we’ll see a lot of these kids being eligible for something like that. It’s an exciting time for us, and we hope to bring all of this together quickly.”

The BAS also reiterated that one of the key pillars of their long-term strategy for youth development is the ActiveSG basketball academy which is currently led by former national coach Neo Beng Siang.

The academy, catering to boys and girls aged five to 14 years old, is currently working with the BAS to develop a consistent curriculum and playing system, and Ong hopes to have the Junior NBA participants continue their basketball journey by joining the academy.

“From this camp, hopefully these players will join the (ActiveSG) academy so they can keep playing basketball consistently, and with the right guidance,” explained Ong. “Subsequently, if they move up to the U-16s and U-18s national age-group teams, the national coach will take over their development from there.”

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