Inniss laments standard of play and coaching among Barbados’ youth

The time has come for young Barbadian sports persons always to strive to be better. It is the only way that the next generation of premier league basketballers will succeed, says coach of the national women’s team, Terry Inniss.

According to Inniss, every year the Barbados Amateur Basketball Association has to resort to players deep in their thirties, both men and women, to represent Barbados because young Barbadian players are not up to the level they ought to be.

During an interview held last night at the Garfield Sobers Sports Complex, following Barbados women’s 72-46 defeat to Rochester University, Inniss said the country needed to build players and then steer them towards the direction of experts who know what it takes to carry them to the next level.

While there is a large pool of players to pull from where the juniors are concerned, the same can’t be said for the Barbados women’s team with a mere 36 players to choose from.

Inniss also expressed concern that they were more qualified coaches in Barbados than ever before and yet the standard of Basketball wasn’t any better.

“Our issue is that we play against one another and we are not that good. So, the abilities to do certain things we have not acquired as yet, the young people I am talking about. You would notice how Toni [Atherley] at her age still can play basketball because she played overseas. So, we need to get our young ladies out and let them play at a higher level and see what real basketball is about and not just playing against each other in Barbados.

“We in trouble right now because we only got thirty-six women playing basketball, so we need to build the pool and work on our young people, coach our young people. We have more qualified coaches in Barbados than we ever had, and our players aren’t any better. Our coaches like to slap their chests and say how great they are, but you are not seeing it in the players.

“We need to get some people overseas, hopefully, we got some young people that colleges overseas are interested in. So, we are hoping to get them overseas and once we get people overseas and people come back and younger people seeing that we can get people overseas, then you start building the pool. But right now, we need to build the girls pool. The girls’ pool is too shallow and persons deep in their thirties still have to come back and play basketball because our young people are not to the level that they should be,” Innis said.

There are no questions whether Barbados has talented basketballers who are great on offence. But the issue, according to Innis, was that they hardly want to play defence. Another pressing issue is that there are rarely regional tournaments for the juniors to compete in and gauge their capabilities.

“We got issues with the men, we got issues with the women, we got issues with our junior basketball. Our junior basketball doesn’t have any regional tournaments, and we can’t tell the young people to come, you would be able to play regional basketball, there is nothing for the juniors. We play one tournament every four or five years and then that is it. We are fortunate that we have some decent basketball juniors both in the girls and boys. But we need to build them because they got certain skills, but they need to get other skills to be consistent, and to be good.

“Right now, they are good basketball players – our good, they are not regional good, nor they are not international good. We need to get them regional good and international good which means they need to work on all facets of their basketball, be it offence or defence. I just coached in a junior final, school league, one team scored eighty-nine points, the next team scored ninety-eight. If I score eighty-nine points in a basketball game in Barbados I should win. But the team that scored eighty-nine came second which means we don’t play any defence, our young people. But we got some really talented young basketball players, they could do a lot of things offensively,” Innis said.

He added: “…We in Barbados, if we don’t get somebody with an accent to come and talk to the coaches, the coaches don’t turn up. And to me they lack a lot of stuff, I mean really lack work as in like being able to coach and break down movements and build a basketball player. You got to be able to build a basketball player if you are a basketball coach. And the issues are we have coaches that can’t build anybody, they could win tournaments and I don’t understand why people feel that if you win a tournament in Barbados that’s the best thing ever. Winning a tournament in Barbados is just winning a tournament in Barbados, if you win a tournament in the Caribbean then you could jump up.”

morissalindsay@barbadostoday.bb