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With sports apart from cricket attracting enthusiasts, American professional basketball league National Basketball Association is working towards promoting the sport at the grassroot level in India.
Yannick Colaco, MD, NBA India, said, “NBA has a comprehensive, long-term plan to grow basketball participation and increase the league’s fan base in India. In the last five years, we have conducted more than 500 events to encourage youngsters to play the game.”
To attract the youth, it has created an annual basketball festival called NBA Jam where youngsters compete in 3-on-3 basketball contests across four cities.
Last month, NBA India also entered into a multi-year partnership with Reliance Foundation to promote the game among school children.
Talking about Reliance Foundation NBA Jr, Colaco said, “Under this programme, we plan to reach out to over 100 schools in the first year in Mumbai, Kochi and Kottyam. We are not just looking to train kids but have put in our resources to train 300 coaches for the country.”
The partner schools are offering the opportunity to all kids from grades 4 to 10 to learn to play basketball over a three-month period under a comprehensive curriculum. These schools have been provided essential resources to teach the game. They also run an after-school programme that is designed to reach out to the youth of nearby communities.
“We have brought in five foreign coaches for the three months in each city to oversee the implementation of the programmes and work with the instructors at the partner schools. These coaches visit each school regularly and conduct after-school programs across the city,” he added.
In a bid to increase access for NBA games to Indian TV viewers , this season 14 live games will be aired per week on sports broadcasting partner SIX, an increase from four games per week last year.
“Creating appointment viewing slots around live sports programming has been a key ingredient of success for many sports leagues, including the most recent success around the IPL in India. ‘NBA Mornings on SIX’ now creates the same for the NBA in India, allowing NBA fans to plan their consumption of our live games and giving casual sports fans the opportunity to sample high quality entertainment of NBA games consistently,” added Colaco.
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