MANISA (Türkiye) - The Youth Basketball Champions League is going from strength to strength on the court, with Season 3 already seeing record numbers of fans attending and a noticeable jump in level of talent on display.
Away from the court, the Basketball Champions League, in cooperation with FIBA also organize a Players Workshop every year.
The goal of these workshops is to give these young athletes invaluable access to mentoring and advice from retired professional players who have already lived the dream they are chasing.
There was also a section of the curriculum dedicated to the tools and resources that FIBA provides on the topics of anti-doping and match-fixing prevention, as presented by Nejat Haciomeroglu.
For Season 3 in Manisa, the host of the Players Workshop is former Slovakia international Radoslav Rancik. Rancik also played for clubs like Galatasaray and ERA Nymburk who are represented in the YBCL, so he couldn't be better placed to understand the road ahead for the games next generation.
"The whole idea behind me coming here is to share my experiences and give players the tools to not just to become good athletes, but to become good people," said Rancik.
"Professional sports are only one part of their lives and the tools that they will develop over their basketball careers are tools that will help them on later in life," he continued.
The value for the players was evident from the way the workshop was received. There was regular engagement and keen questions returning in Rancik's direction. There seemed a real eagerness to soak up as much information as possible.
"I've been very pleased with the way they reacted," he explained.
"Some of the questions were in regards to their own personal problems or something they're dealing with, whether that is confidence, or how to deal with teammates."
For Rancik, the process of using his own experiences to help the next generation find solutions, is a richly rewarding one. Especially considering that initiatives such as this were not the norm when he was beginning his own playing career.
"Unfortunately, at the time when I was growing up, mentorship wasn't available at the time."
In fact, in the absence of mentorship, Rancik learned some of his most valuable lessons from his own enterprise and drive to succeed as a student athlete in the USA.
"While I was in America studying in high school at their age, I quickly realized that if I want to become a professional basketball player, I really have to step up my game, not just on the basketball court, but off the court," he recalled.
And it was the holistic nature of becoming a better student off the court that also had it's benefits on the hardwood.
"I found very quickly that the more intelligent I became, the better decisions I made on the court," he stated.
It was these lessons about becoming a student of life and at the same time a student of the game that Rancik was so keen to impart onto the players during the workshop.
After seeing the standard of the event organization, with broadcast quality camera plans, professional officiating crews and everything that you would expect to find at a senior FIBA event, Rancik was left with no doubts that playing in the YBCL will been an indispensable learning experience for every player competing this week.
"Now they get to see what a professional organization of a tournament looks like."
"Players get to see other players play and maybe catch a few positive things from seeing other players, how they do it, how they're successful, and try to copy it into their own basketball style," he explained.
"There's talented players here that have a bright future, and I hope they stick to it, they keep on playing, and keep on working hard, and, you know, at the end of the day, it's in their hands what they do with their career."