Charles Barton: “There is a good team”

Charles Barton has “good vibes” in the first training sessions of Acunsa Gipuzkoa Basket. “I do not know yet what the level of the rivals will be, but I can say that we are working well and that it is a good team,” says the one who is called to be the starting guard and that he will absorb a significant volume of shots. Born in Lulea on January 7, 1992, he confessed this morning that the connection he had with the Swedish coach, Hugo López, formerly of GBC, was what has brought him to LEB Oro, “an important category in a country in which their leagues and their basketball are among the best in Europe.

He only has words of praise for his coach Lolo Encinas, “a good coach and a better person who is helping me and my family a lot – his wife is pregnant, as he has confessed – to adapt to the city as soon as possible.”

Barton will make his LEB Gold debut after a long career that has taken him to a handful of European countries. This past season he has played in up to three teams and the previous one in another two. He started the course in Sweden with Jamtland, where he played three games before moving to Latvian Tartu Ulikool. There he was 25 games, with averages of 13 points, 4.5 assists and percentages close to 40% in the triple. He concluded the campaign with the last ten games at Saint Chamond in the French second division, with five goals a day.

He trained at the American University of Oregon State where he played with the Beavers for three years between 2011 and 2014. Later, in his leap to professionalism until now reaching San Sebastián, he has been several times in his native Sweden, in the German Bundesliga, in the Belgian league, the second Italian, the second German and the Austrian league. Gipuzkoa Basket will be his eleventh club and eighth country in eight years of career.

After several championships with the Swedish youth team, he made his senior debut in the 2019/20 season and this past year he has played three more games in the qualifiers for the next Eurobasket. There he has been under the command of Hugo López, who was a partner of Lolo Encinas in the coaching staff led by Pablo Laso in his time at Gipuzkoa Basket.

He is a player who can play in the guard and guard positions. “I see myself more than two but if it is necessary to do it in other positions, I will,” he confessed in his presentation at the premises of the Cenor appliance store in San Sebastián. His scoring ability, both from the outside and in penetrations, is what stands out the most in his game. In addition, with the profile of organizers that Acunsa Gipuzkoa Basket already has, it will be able to complement well the Icelandic Steinersson and Aitor Zubizarreta, players with fewer points in their hands and focused on tasks of a more traditional base.

Barton comes from a family tied to basketball. His father was a coach and his mother a player. Always in a positive and smiling mood, he has confessed that his mother is “the most critical, the one who always calls me on the phone at the end of a match to correct aspects of the game.”

In the club, satisfied

On the other hand, the manager of the Josean Ibiriku club has expressed his satisfaction with the good progress of the subscriber campaign, with queues at the Anoeta offices. «We believe we have gotten closer with the campaign and that there is a desire for basketball. We are going to reach out to people and we will be in many places in the next few weeks to try to hook the fans. Ibiriku wanted to thank the Gipuzkoa hospitality association for its willingness to collaborate with the club to offer twelve dinners to fans who participate in the membership recruitment campaign.