Lori McDaniel fills us in on her activities prior to, and during the lockdown
Heading into March, the basketball scene was looking good from my eyes due the following programs:
We had a new program running, the CRDP, for high school age athletes and coaches not involved in Waitaha Rep programs.
Development coaches from a variety of Clubs, Gators, Pioneer, North Canterbury, Selwyn, and Celebration Lions had banded together to form a Hoops Collaboration Group that was meeting monthly to pool knowledge and develop strategies for growing sport at the community level in our region.
That collaboration had continued in the form of a cross code coaches collective that were also meeting regularly to share resources and ideas of how to provide for our coaches
Weekly skills sessions had just started at Hagley College, where their basketball program had reached out to the CBA to provide some skill development to help foster the love and growth of the sport in their school. 55 young athletes showed up to further their basketball knowledge and skill set.
Several of the Clubs had invested in the growth of the their programs by providing parent and coach education, as well as opening up their sessions for observations and feedback.
We had good numbers signed up for our FIBA Level One coaches course (which takes eight hours!)
Enter March 26th and COVID-19
As is the always the case, things change. This time the change was forced upon us by COVID-19, and the basketball landscape changed dramatically as did the world.
No longer able to interact, coach sessions, play games, or deliver courses in person, we now had to look at ways to maintain and foster our community in other ways. There have been fantastic innovations on how coaches, athletes, teams, schools, and communities are staying connected and even thriving, and those are only the ones that we can see. For my part, here are the ways I am trying to still do my job, but more importantly, remain connected to our basketball community, and provide some form of humour and comic relief:
“Lock Down With Lori” became a tri-weekly update on players, coaches, and members of our sporting community around New Zealand. Some of them are light-hearted and borderline ridiculous, and some have a few bits of content that may be helpful. But mostly, they get people from our community visible and heard
As much of the basketball community is based in the school space, we wanted to provide some basketball content to supplement the great online content already available. Hoops and Mini Hoops are free weekly programs that provide a few basketball like activities for parents and care givers to do with their school-aged children and help them keep moving and see some different faces.
The “Hoops Colab”, in conjunction with Mick Downer at the Canterbury Rams, have been working on a current, comprehensive, and progressive skills matrix that we hope will assist coaches and athletes alike in the coming months
Along with Zoom, Skype, FB messenger and Teams meetings with coaches and athletes from multiple sports, this time in isolation has allowed me to start working on a progressive, plus age and stage appropriate, coaching curriculum for the CBA to use in 2021 to help maintain our high standard of coaching, and to provide a great base for new and junior coaches to start from.
I do not know what the basketball landscape will look like in a few months, but I do know that getting in my Miles Toyota Rav4 and driving it to the supermarket is fantastic and I cannot wait to drive it to all the gyms in Christchurch once we are back on our feet!
