Santo Domingo — The Dominican Basketball Federation’s (FEDOMBAL) and the Dominican Basketball Coaching School’s (CODEBAL) efforts to develop basketball in the Dominican Republic continued full steam ahead last week with the celebration of the International Revalidation and Updating Workshop for more than 400 national coaches.

This initiative is aimed at coaches and directives of superior tournaments, featured representations of delegations from San Francisco de Macorís, La Altagracia Province, Puerto Plata, San Pedro de Macorís, Duarte Province and Bonao. The focus of this program is for personnel to stay up to date with the newest technical and technological skills.

The training sessions took place at Santo Domingo’s Mauricio Báez Club and featured — as main resource — José Ignacio Hernández, technical director of the Spanish Basketball Federation’s (FEB) women's national teams.

“I came to contribute my knowledge to this country in order to reinforce the structures that have had an excellent development, growth and improvement in their national teams in recent years,” said Hernández. “There's a great chance here to advance, they've achieved so in many aspects, and from Spain we’ll help them improve. They've taken basketball throughout the country to directive, competitive, athletic levels, and they're decided to prepare coaches and referees.”

Hernández’s record was impressive much before being appointed director in 2017. He was responsible for the first medal of the Spanish women's team in a FIBA Basketball World Cup, a bronze achieved in 2010, in the Czech Republic. Then, in 2018, as hosts in Tenerife, he led them to win the bronze once again. Hernández had also been the national team coach for the last six youth Spanish teams that brought home consecutive gold medals from 2015 to 2017.

This is the first initiative in the cooperation agreement signed last November in Spain by the Dominican and Spanish basketball federations.

One of the special points of this agreement consists in preparing national coaches, and Coach Hernández’s visit is the first step of a series of shared work that they will develop starting this year.

FIBA