José Luis Sáez: “The goal is to be the number one company in basketball services”

From: www.feb.es
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José Luis Sáez, FEB president, was the protagonist of the Ferrándiz-As Forum where he spoke of the past and future of Spanish Basketball at a conference called “Goals Achieved and Future Challenges.” José Luis Sáez expressed his desires to great sports and international basketball personalities. “The goal is to be the number one company in basketball services and to achieve to goal of having a basketball in every home.”

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The event was presented by Pedro Ferrándiz, who emphasized the; ¨Growing personal influence that José Luis Sáez has in international environments,¨ where, in addition to his work, he, ¨Creates and strengthens the structure of the Federation, and promotes basketball.¨ Alfredo Relaño, director of the As daily newspaper, was the moderator of a debate in which four specialized journalists ( David Sánchez of Real Madrid TV, Jorge Muñoa of EFE, Paco Torres of Gigantes, and Quique Peinado of laSexta) participated, in addition to the rest of the participants, including Bob Elphinston (president of FIBA), Patrick Baumann (FIBA executive director), Mercedes Coghen (delegate minister of Madrid 2016), Pepu Hernández (national team coach), Evaristo Pérez (national women´s team coach), Juan Martín Caño (FEB vice president and president of the Madrid Basketball Federation), among others.

THE ACHIEVED GOALS AND THE FUTURE CHALLENGES

THE PAST:
When Ernesto Segura de Luna called me in 1998 to become part of the Spanish Basketball Federation, there was a general feeling of lets downs and low self esteem. The FEB competitions were very limited, and furthermore, basketball had a conflictive image; it seemed like there were fights within the same institutions of the sport. It was necessary to work on a serious athletics project, to create economic stability (which at the time was very important) and to extend the promotion and competition on a social level.

PRESENT:
With one year left to go in my term, I feel that we are on our way. In the first place, we have a serious institutional project, in which we gained credibility with our main partner, The Superior Ministry of Athletics. Regarding the conflicts that we had, our first objective was to obtain social peace, to change the fighting for teamwork, and we have also achieved this. We now have the tools that can make us stand out internationally. This isn’t just happening when the president is present, it’s happening in many different environments, and with different commissions where Spanish Basketball is gaining international strength.

As far as athletics, we just have to look at the rankings where we are number one at the each of the eight European tournaments this summer, from the training levels to the top level. We played in eight different tournament finals. We can’t assure positive results, but we are competing with the best. Before, we took pictures with American teams thinking that the game was already lost before it even began. Not anymore.

FUTURE:
As far as athletics, we have invested in the future so we can be sure that we’ll be playing with the best in upcoming international championships. The results in the training categories are proof of this.

Economically, 60% of our budget used to come from outside economic support, that has now changed to 30%.

In the future we look to generate our own resources. Another one of our objectives is to sign collaboration agreements with as many City Councils and Autonomous Communities as possible. In order to do that we have the ideal contacts, the Autonomous Federations.

As far as social topics, we already have projects such as Our Complete Basketball, The Mini World Games of Immigration, which we presented yesterday, and health projects against youth alcoholism. We are working in South America, Africa, and now in China. The objective is to be the number one country of basketball services in the world. We have the highest hopes, we hope to have a basketball in every home in Spain. This is a social commitment. This won’t be made possible by a president and a few ideas, yet by the work of many people.

OTHER POSSIBLE FORMS OF BASKETBALL
The FEB is completely open to strengthen other forms of basketball such as 3 on 3, 1 on 1, etc. We’ve been working on this for many years, so we’ll be ready when we implement these different forms. I think it’s a cheap and easy way to strengthen basketball.

FEAR OF POSSIBLE CYCLES IN BASKETBALL
The success factor is important to get people’s attention, but those of us at the FEB are working on long-term structures. We would love to be Olympic champions or repeat a world Championship, but we can’t guarantee that…. The important thing we do have is the future, to be able to compete at a maximum level. If we keep working in the same way, in schools, with talent scouts, at high-level competition, with the teams and coaches, etc. we’ll have the players to secure top level play. There may be other countries who do things better than us, and win competitions, but we’ll be there, competing right alongside them.

COMMON RULES
In basketball we have special ways to make our lives complicated. I think we have to do things in a simple manner and we have to strive for unification of rules and homogeneous competition systems. I would like to take steps on the path towards unification of the rules with FIBA.

JORGE GARBAJOSA
I’d put him on any team and I think that he will end up playing many more minutes, and in important moments. I’m proud of players that have made decisions like the ones he has made.