BC Boncourt is halfway through the season of its “reconstruction operation”, seven months after management’s decision to leave the Swiss basketball elite to concentrate on its youth sector. After 10 matches in the 1st league, the third national level, the first team of the Ajoulot club is in 8th place out of 11 teams with four victories and six defeats. “We could have done a little better by picking up one or two more victories, but the team is progressing well. We see that the more the weeks go by, the more we progress,” notes top scorer Simon Ducommun, former player of the team who played in the elite Swiss Basketball League.
“It’s a good result because we only played four matches at home and at the start of the championship, we had an average age of 17.5 years! It’s clear that we lacked experience… but we learned a lot in this first part of the season, it will be better later,” confirms coach Nemanja Calasan. The locker room remains united around the objective of securing the play-offs, reserved for the top seven, with the ambition in the future to join the fight for a rise to the second division. “In any case in the locker room, the desire is there. The club… we don’t really know what it thinks. We players want to do our best,” says Simon Ducommun, who depicts a lack of clear line coming from the leaders.
A vast project that requires “a lot of patience”
At the head of a very young team, Nemanja Calasan asks above all for “time and patience” to bring players to maturity and reform the structure of the club. “We need a new format so we had to rebuild the 1st league and the U18s. In my career, I have worked with around twenty coaches, I also watch a lot of things in the United States and elsewhere. I try to draw inspiration from all that with our structure of life in Switzerland to give the maximum to our youth. It’s a huge project that requires a lot of patience,” argues the former SBL kingpin. BC Boncourt will begin its second championship game this Sunday at 4 p.m. at the Chaudron against Aarau. /mmi-jpi
2024-01-08 11:20:13
#Boncourt #team #evolving
