The city of Nördlingen is built on diamonds, said to be 70,000 tons. Even the houses in the medieval town center were made from it. Seen this way, the people on the northern edge of the Swabian Alb are quite rich, and if there wasn’t a catch in the matter, Martin Fürleger or one of his board colleagues from BG Donau-Ries would certainly have gone into the cellar at the beginning of the year and pulled out one or two of the stones and sacrificed them to the shared passion project.
But of course the people in the Ries know that the diamond dust in the ground cannot be mined – and is therefore worthless. That’s why Fürleger and his colleagues faced a huge problem until a few weeks ago. It was “nerve-wracking,” he says on the phone, “it was a time with very little sleep.” A live stream is running in the background, the third quarter between Alba Berlin and the Rutronik Stars Keltern, the decisive duel for the German championship. As the sports director of a team in the first women’s basketball league (DBBL), you of course watch it. Nevertheless, Fürleger turns off the sound. He has something to tell.
In mid-March, the owners Angels Nördlingen made their financial distress public. 75,000 euros were missing to be able to seriously apply for a license for the 17th DBBL year, and time was running out. Of course, the financial hole was not as unexpected as the meteorite that fell from the sky around 15 million years ago, which, in addition to diamond dust, left behind a 25-kilometer-large crater, today’s Ries. After all, we knew all the requirements that were to come in the DBBL, says Fürleger: full-time positions, LED gangs, training funds and much more. But the voluntary structures that the club is so proud of harbor dangers. They only started to calculate the new challenges in January and then realized: “This is going to be tough.” Their previous budget, 300,000 euros, is one of the smallest in the league – and wasn’t enough.
A successor has been found for the unexpectedly departing coach Rozlapa
Fürleger is certain that without going public, “we wouldn’t be here anymore.” Almost on the last day of the deadline they had collected the declared amount. A third came from private individuals and two thirds from companies, each of which demonstrated that the angels were “relevant” to them and their region. They are therefore “proud”, emphasizes Fürleger and reminds us of how bitter an end would have been: the team had just delivered its best season to date, playoff quarter-finals and second place in the cup.
That It is now clear that things will continue for a while, because in the threatening situation some people would have taken action unwaveringly. But How it continues?
As long as the end of professional basketball in the Ries was looming, it was difficult for them to talk to their players. “The other clubs naturally attacked them,” says Fürleger. Naomi Davenport is gone; Fürleger sees the chance of retaining the outstanding Erika Davenport as slim; He hopes to be able to persuade perhaps half the squad to stay, especially with the young playmaker Nicole Brochlitz. And then those responsible were caught off guard by the departure of coach Matiss Rozlapa. A week after the end of the season, his agent informed them that the Latvian would not return but would move to Saarlouis. He takes the Finn Roosa Lehtoranta with him. “That could have been communicated differently,” says the sports director.
So the work was far from done when the 75,000 euros were collected at the last second, on the contrary. They have now found a new coach, the Finn Niko Kuusi, 35. A year ago, he only lost the “head-to-head race” with Rozlapa, says Fürleger, because people had the impression that he wasn’t really keen been on a foreign engagement. We now know the reason, his name is Leonie. At that time, Kuusi was about to become a father. “Now he’s coming to us with his wife and daughter, which we see as a good sign.” Kuusi used the year’s delay to become champions with the Finnish top club Torpan Pojat Helsinki.
And further?
The club already has the LED board required by the league, but still has to pay it off. The financial needs are by no means covered; Fürleger estimates that another 50,000 euros will have to be collected in the coming months – a lot depends on the candidates for full-time management and their salary expectations. From the season after next, the league is demanding an indoor floor on which only basketball lines can be seen so that the venues do not look like they are school gymnasiums – which, as in Nördlingen, they usually are. Given the huge range from LED glass flooring to a rolling floor, the Swabians will probably have to make do with the smallest possible solution for now: masking off line by line. They went through it, “14 men, two and a half hours of work,” before every game. That’s the price.
With a win on Sunday, Wasserburg should be promoted in terms of sport
Alba Berlin won the title in the end. The newcomers from the big city with the men’s first division team in the background prevailed (even without sound) against the guests from Keltern. The Berlin Sömmeringhalle was sold out, 2,400 spectators – that’s a quarter of the entire population of the Keltern community. As unequal as the opponents were, Fürleger knows that both of them had a much larger budget than they had. They move in this environment. He doesn’t see a trend towards big cities, but he doesn’t know how long they can compensate for their locational disadvantages – no university, rural structures, no financially strong men’s first division team – through voluntary commitment alone.
By the way, nobody watched the final between Berlin and Keltern at the former series champion Wasserburg, not even without sound. At the same time, TSV was in the second division playoffs and equalized its semi-final series against Bad Homburg in front of its own audience, 65:63. Seven seconds before the end, Sophie Perner made the decision from a distance, the hall almost fell apart from the noise, Perner gasped in disbelief. On Sunday (4:30 p.m.) they can move into the final at the same place – and would therefore be eligible for promotion.
Coach Luis Prantl just wants to concentrate on sports, but he knows that the new department management is trying everything in the background to make the impossible possible in this case: to become fit for the first league again, despite all the requirements – without a big city, without University, only with a lot of commitment and a hall full of school sports lines. And they don’t even have diamond dust.
2024-05-03 14:46:11
#Womens #Basketball #Bundesliga #Completely #diamonds #Sport
