The National League of Basketball (LNB) that started yesterday will mark a milestone in history. And it will not be because of its renewed form of dispute according to what the pandemic context demands. The salient fact of the 20/21 edition is that, for the first time, a woman is part of the staff of one of the participating teams.
Is about Laura Cors, who is part of the technical staff of Bahía Basket. She hails from the city that was declared the National Capital of Basketball in 2017 and which, in addition to having trained great players with Emanuel Ginobili as “standard bearer”, will set a precedent this time that may begin to change a “map” made up of it. way for 35 years now.
The hope is that this path that Laura opens in basketball can be replicated in the elite of other sports, because the “rarity” of seeing a woman training men is hardly less rare when talking about women training women in Argentina, even in sports with strong feminine lines like volleyball or hockey.
In volleyball, the only team that was going to have a woman as a coach to face the next Argentine Women’s League (Villa Dora) decided this week to get out of the competition for the Coronavirus. And in the last hockey Metropolitano (the most important competition in South America), of 14 teams in the First Division, only two “Vintage Leonas” stood out in the technical staff: María Paz Ferrari is the head coach of Belgrano Athletic (it was many years the coach) and Alejandra Gulla is a field assistant in the last champion Lomas.
And although Laura Cors does have experience as a women’s coach (she worked for 23 years in Lanús and was part of the technical staff of the national teams), her presence in the “health bubble” in Buenos Aires will make her the only female coach among the 20 teams competing in the National League. Something unprecedented in Argentine basketball.
Bahía Basket’s proposal was to create a staff linear, with specialists who work with specific functions in the training of the players. In this framework, Cors is in charge of defending a coaching staff that does not have a head coach. So it doesn’t just break in like first woman in the elite of Argentine basketball but it does it without being below anyone: it is on par.
Undoubtedly, another beloved son of the city of Bahia has a lot to do with this present: Juan Ignacio Sánchez. “Pepe” commands Bahía Basket and he does it with an innovative vision: to the work in the training of players he added a training space of the highest level and now he gave the coup de grace by hiring a woman who gave ample proof of her ability . Years ago he had also “innovated” by adding a physiotherapist. His time in the NBA and the European elite as a player undoubtedly gave him great tools and opened his head to a reality that many leaders still do not see in the country.
The original text of this article was published on 11/5/2020 in our print edition.
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