Basketball team will gain life experience on trip to Africa
Eastern Commerce players, coaches take part in Seeds Hoop Academy
A contingent of eleven student-athletes from the Toronto area, including members of the Eastern Commerce Saints boy's basketball team, boarded a plane Monday, April 14, to Africa for their next series of lessons.
The Saints' Roy Rana and Trevor Bullen have been assigned head coach and assistant coaching duties for Team Toronto, while Marvin Binney, Tyler Murray, Ketaton Cole, Jerome Brown and Jean Paul Kambola will all get the chance to test their mettle against Africa's elite at the Seeds Hoop Academy Forum, a multi-day summit of all things basketball.
The trip, which will include a Pan African tourney that will see representation from Senegal, Nigeria, Cameroon, South Africa, Cape Verde and Burkina Faso, marks the first visit from a non-African school.
Marvin Binney, a Grade 12 student with the Saints program who has another year with the team, is confident his teammates will return to Canada with a new outlook on life.
"I think we'll be more grateful for what we have here. I think it'll be a reality check for all of us," he said, explaining that he was "in shock" when he was approached by Rana about being a part of it all.
"It's just incredible, we're all very excited about it," said Bullen, a teacher at the school and coach with the Saints program for 11 years.
"The incredible thing is the life experience these kids get when they go on this kind of trip. Many of them wouldn't even dream of getting to Africa," he added.
And then there's the basketball side of things: "They'll get the opportunity to play with some high-level kids from over there, get a chance to improve... I mean some of these (Team Toronto) kids may make it to the Olympics."
Rana, a coach at the local high school for eight years who watched his team lose the provincial high school crown last month to the Pickering Trojans by a single point, got the ball rolling on the trip last year after communicating with Seeds organizers about the prospect of sending a team.
Organizers were very responsive to the idea.
"Roy got into contact with them last summer and they said 'hey, why don't you bring a team'... so we've been fundraising and trying to make this thing happen ever since," outlined Bullen.
In a media release, Rana, who has taken a year off from teaching duties, said that there is much more to the trip than simply basketball. "This is a phenomenal opportunity to open minds and help empower the athletes participating. It's about much more than basketball, it's about life," he said.
A filmmaker from Raptors TV, Akil Augustine, is putting together a documentary of the trip which will be aired later this year.
The Seeds Hoops Forum, which was put into place by NBA Dallas Mavericks head scout Amadou Fall, a native of Senegal, Africa, is being financially supported by a number of local organizations, including the Toronto District School Board, Eastern Commerce Collegiate and a handful of Toronto basketball operations.
Players and their parents were also responsible for raising some money.
