Africa Nazarene University coach Mike Oluoch has called for introduction of a data bank to help monitor all potential national women team players.
This system, he said if adopted, will help pick the national side for the Fiba Africa Zone Five 2021 Women AfroBasket preliminary round games slated for February 10-15 in Cairo, Egypt.
He observed that this is the only way Kenya can track good players who are based out of the country and bring them home for trials when assembling national teams for international duties.
Oluoch noted that the sterling performance of the national men’s side, the Morans, in Fiba Africa tournament was largely attributed to the availability of diaspora-based players to the side.
“We have many good players out there. But we have no idea who they are and whether they are playing or not. The only way to monitor their performance is to have a data bank for all of them,” Oluoch said.
He went on: “The world is now one big village and using zoom and WhatsApp. We can talk to their coaches regularly and get their game clips to asses how they are doing.”
He said the data bank and the tracking system should start from high school, college up to club level and should be for both local players as well as those who are based outside the country.
“This system if adopted will easily help in monitoring the players and subsequent call them up for national duty. This is what they do in some countries within the region,” he said.
He said there was also need to consider training a pool of players regularly throughout the year and this can be done twice or thrice a month. “This will keep the players in shape. This is also the only way the coaches can keep constant evaluation of players named in the team and also give them an opportunity to try different players,” Oluoch observed.
He appealed to the Kenya Basketball Federation (KBF) to pick as many coaches, probably five, to work with the national team in future if the country is to regain their lost glory on the continent.
In their last year’s Fiba AfroBasket championship in Dakar, Senegal, Kenya lost all their matches—going down 55-39 to Mozambique, 64-51 to Angola and 64-57 to Cape Verde.
Oluoch believes the poor showing by the national team in past continental championships could be reversed if a pool of good coaches were named to work with the head coach.
“Let us assign many coaches to our national teams as it is the norm in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. This way, they stand to help one another and cover many areas,” he said.
