From www.thisdayonline.com
Download source here

The national junior men’s basketball team, the Junior Tigers will begin their final preparations toward the 2007 FIBA Junior Championship next month going by the detail made available by the Nigeria Basketball Federation (NBBF). The Technical Committee headed by Dr. Adamu Ahmed met in Abuja last week to fine tune the training schedule of the team, the female players and their league amongst others.

By the Junior Tigers schedule, the first stage of the camping will begin April 22nd in Lagos will run through the 29th. The camp billed for Lagos will feature only the home-based players for this stage.

"Those based in the USA are essentially students and are clearly unavailable this period due to school calendar," Adamu explained.

The second phase is planned for June 1st through July 1st but the exact venue is yet to be certified. The juniors are programmed for either Kaduna or Enugu for this final stage that will feature all the players including the likes of Solomon Alabi, Emmanuel Negedu and David Katunga. This camp will produce the final team list for the FIBA World event scheduled to hold in, Novi Sad, Serbia from July 12th to 22.

The Junior Tigers who are Group C will play their opening game on the 12th against Canada before lining up against Australia and Turkey respectively the following two days. The Nigerian junior men are scheduled to fly out to Europe by exactly one week to the start of the championship which was first programmed for Canada before it was moved to Europe.

Nigeria qualified for the World championship last year from Durban, South Africa where the African junior championship was held. Nigeria retained the trophy won in Cairo, Egypt in 2002.