By Imman Canicosa
The sound of basketballs simultaneously reverberating on the floor mingled with idle conversations filled the seventh floor of the Enrique Razon Sports Complex in De La Salle University (DLSU).
Normally, only a couple of PE classes would be filling up the place at this time of the day.
Today, however, was obviously a different case.
At one end of the basketball court, students sweating profusely were wiping their foreheads while following the leg movements of their fitness instructor. Others were busy either showing off their dribbling skills or asking for Gatorade bottles from the nearby booths of the event sponsors.
Most of the students, though, were jostling at the center of the court. Among them are Green Archers Maui Villanueva, Joseph Marata and Jovet Mendoza, giddy as students on their first day at school. And in the midst of it all was NBA Coach Erik Spoelstra, not showing any signs of fatigue, beaming as he signed autographs and posed for pictures.
The Filipino-American Head Coach of the Miami Heat, along with his assistant coach David Fizdale, are in the Philippines as a part of NBA Fit Week Philippines, an arm of the NBA Cares Program, which aims to promote fitness among children through the sponsoring of free basketball clinics.
The event kicked off last August 7, and by the time Spoelstra and his team of basketball and fitness and wellness experts made it to La Salle, they had already conducted clinics in SM North EDSA and in another UAAP-member school, Far Eastern University (FEU).
“It’s really fun to see them here, because I personally wanted to train and educate kids and help them exercise through basketball to help them have a healthy lifestyle,” said Spoelstra, the youngest NBA coach today, and will be in his third season as Heat head coach.
The son of a long-time NBA executive, Spoelstra himself donned a basketball uniform, as he played four years as court general for the University of Portland, picking up a West Coast Conference Freshman of the Year plum in 1989 on the way to becoming a staple in the Heat organization.
Another objective of the program is to conduct renovations of basketball courts, as well as to successfully conduct a basketball clinic in San Pablo, Laguna, which is the hometown of Spoelstra’s mother.
The program will invite the top 80 players of the UAAP to conduct a simulation of an NBA training camp at the Araneta Coliseum on August 11, while the clinic in San Pablo will take place on August 12. Capping off the nine-day event is a Fun Run and the Finals of the Basketball Challenge on August 14 and 15, respectively, both at the SM Mall of Asia.
He is in for a very tiring week, as well as a challenging NBA season ahead with the addition of big names like Lebron James, Chris Bosh, and Zydrunas Ilgauskas on the Heat roster. But for just one week, Spoelstra will first focus entirely on imparting his basketball know-how to his kababayans.
