The NBA travels to Africa

May 19

The NBA travels to Africa

By Darren Gorton News Add comments

Amadou Gallo Fall

Following on from our story recently that the NBA will open offices in South Africa in 2010, SlamOnline interviewed Amadou Fall, the man who will lead the NBA’s charge into Africa.

Fall’s key concepts are relatively simple (a good thing!):

infrastructure and accessibility to courts
people to teach fundamentals
training coaches
encouraging competition at the school level

When questioned about why the NBA’s African head office will be in Johannesburg, Amadou Fall provided this answer:

“There are a number of factors. The World Cup being there this year will mean the eyes of the world will be there. We’ve been going to South Africa with Basketball without Borders for the past eight years and we recognize the opportunity and challenge for us to grow the game there. It’s easy to talk about the lack of ease of travel [through the continent] being in South Africa, but I think there is a big opportunity in this country. There are 50 million people, the economic resources are there, there is an opportunity. There was a professional league that was thriving up to the late ’90s. The league went under not because of lack of interest or funding but it was more conflicts of views from different parties involved. We hope that’s been resolved because the country’s potential to have a strong, professional league as in other places is there. It’s been recognized by our partners who have offices there so we thought it was a good place to start.”

You can read the full interview on SLAMOnline here.

Read more about Amadou Gallo Fall:

Darren spent many years playing basketball in Pretoria, searching out every possible way to gain extra inches on his vertical in order to disprove the theory that white men can't jump. After being distracted by the corporate world for several years, Darren returned to the game he loves to contribute in some way to its' future. Darren firmly believes we will see basketball in its rightful place as one of the top sports in South Africa, and that one of the keys to doing so is seeing information about the game made easily accessible to everyone. This is why he is now part of the MyBasketball team.