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For the
second straight year, a group from Jordan Brand
will travel to Europe -- this time to Vilnius,
Lithuania -- for a two-day training camp with 40
of the top prospects in the world from March
4-9. Ten players will be selected as the
Most Valuable Players from the camp and they
will travel to the United States in April, along
with six players from other regions of the world
to compete in the second annual
International Game as part of the Jordan Brand Classic
on Saturday, April 18th at Madison Square Garden in New
York City. The following is a blog and daily photo
gallery from Kevin Foley, who will be along for the
trip.
Vilnius,
Lithuania (March 6): My day
started with a very nice breakfast in the hotel
with Susan Mulders who oversees basketball
sports marketing for Nike Europe. Not only
is she one of the most knowledgeable people in
the world of basketball, but she is probably the
MVP of this trip for all of her hard work behind
the scenes. It is not an easy task to work
with the 20+ different countries that will be
represented here this weekend. She is also
a former European pro who had a successful
career in Spain, Germany and France. She
speaks five different languages and does a
tremendous job maintaining relationships with so
many people. Just imagine if every state
in the U.S. spoke a different language, had
unique customs and were all extremely
competitive against each other. And your
job was to manage all of them.
Since we
will finally be getting into basketball
tomorrow, I thought it would also be a good idea
to make this blog a little more educational.
Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania with a
population of 555,000 and was known to be
discovered in 1323. In June 1940, Lithuania was annexed
(made a territory) by the Soviet Union.
The country was then occupied by Germany during
World War II and sadly, 190,000 or 91% of the
pre-war Lithuanian Jewish population was killed, one of the highest total mortality rates of the Holocaust.
Almost fifty years later, on March 11, 1990, the
country announced it's independence from the
Soviet Union and was officially recognized as a
separate country in August 1991. This
year, Vilnius was selected as a 2009 European
capital of culture. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Early in
the afternoon we went over to the Sarunas
Academy to welcome the players who were arriving
from all over Europe. In all, 22 countries
are represented among the 40 kids -- they are Bosnia,
Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, England, Finland,
France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy,
Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia,
Spain, Sweden, Turkey and Ukraine. It was
pretty incredible having them all in the same
room. I can't wait to see them on the
court tomorrow! We
had our player and coach orientations tonight
and then the Sarunas Academy hosted us for a
nice dinner to kick off the weekend. And the
most random thing I learned about Europe
today? They use different sized
paper. It is taller and thinner than our
normal 8.5 x 11 letter size. I have been
here three times before and never noticed
that. Every document that I had to print
today had to be reformatted to fit the new
size. I feel like I spent most of my day
converting things. Time is written by a
24-hour clock like army time (for example it is
2300 right now -- 11 pm). Driving
distances are kilometers. In terms of
basketball, player heights are in centimeters
and weights are in kilograms. To convert
money -- which I did at the bank on my first day
-- it is easiest to convert from Litas to Euros
to Dollars. One dollar is equal to about
2.84 Litas, but the overall value of the dollar
in Europe is very weak. The second interesting item
of the day is that I realized my bathroom
floor is heated. Finally,
I would like to thank Slobodan Miljenovic from
Serbia for his kind email. Best of luck to
your son here this weekend! As always,
feel free to drop
me an email if you have any comments,
questions or recommendations for site-seeing
here.
Stay
tuned!!!! |
