GUADALAJARA, 21 Jun. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The women’s basketball coach, Miguel Méndez, assured that the replacement of the internationals must be done “calmly and with time” without putting “excessive pressure” on them and described the project as “completely different” from the previous one, in which the team reached, according to him, “the best moment in its history”.
“The relay must be done calmly and with time. I think it’s good that we talk a lot about them, about the younger ones, that many of them are doing well, but you have to be very patient and not put pressure on them excessive because many are going to do some of the things for the first time in their lives at the level they are going to find later,” the Galician commented in an interview with Europa Press during the national team’s ‘Road to the Future’ tour.
Méndez affirms that some of the players “are beginning to aim for great things”, but that it is different to do it at the team level than with the national team. “One thing is to point things out in your club, many of them without playing European competition or without having the objective of winning titles, and another thing is the highest level or pressure that we have when we come to the Spanish, it takes time for that learning and to compete with the best players on the continent, they are different things and you have to be patient”, he explained.
The Galician coach joined the national team at the end of 2021, knowing that, without being able to participate in the 2022 World Cup, his first major tournament would be the 2023 Eurobasket. With a past in the national team, Miguel Méndez sees positive having already worked with many of the players.
“I think I have worked practically with all those who are here, and with those who are not, because we have played many times against one another, and there is an important knowledge of them about me and me about them, and this helps. I have been lucky of working in training categories, I’ve been there for many years, I think the first time I took it was in 2001, including players who many are already retired”, he stressed.
However, it also values the work that is done in Spain. “In the federation there is a very important preliminary work, there are many reports, there are the technicians who work in the federation, who do it very well. A person could arrive here who did not know the players at all and the following week be soaked with everything there is. We form an organization that is well oiled,” he said.
Miguel Méndez takes the opportunity at the head of the Spanish bench “as a privilege”. The Galician values ”being able to be the final link in the chain” that makes up all the levels of Spanish basketball, which “work for many days a year to have good competitions, clinics, coaching courses and there are many who work with these players during the year”. “I am the final link and I consider myself the privileged one who manages to complete everything in the end, it is a great pleasure to be here,” he added.
Méndez spoke, from his experience of “20 years working more or less constantly with the federation”, about “the operation of the national teams” and its difference with coaching a team.
“In a club you have eight or nine months to build, you can sign players from all over the world and you have a lot of time to build affinities, chemistry, and technically and tactically to a team. In a selection, be it training or the absolute, you don’t have that time, everything has to be prioritizing much more everything you do and the work is completely different and perhaps the experience I have in formation selections I can also use in the absolute”, he explained.
“I’M OFFERED A JOB THAT I LIKE IN A FREE POSITION”
The coach relieved Lucas Mondelo on the bench, who had been with the team for nine years in a glorious stage that ended controversially. “Surely we come from the best moment of the Spanish team in its history. A series of players from different generations have coincided with a great personality, with an incredible competitive character and we have been able to make a very powerful team that has achieved many successes led by a high-level coaching staff that many times has also been the differential factor between one team and the other,” Méndez stated.
He did not want to enter into controversy about his predecessor, who has had to go to court both for his dismissal by the federation and for accusations of psychological abuse by two players. “Nothing changes for me, here we are all professionals, they offer me a job that I like and in a job that is free, therefore I have nothing more to say,” he said.
“That stage is over, we are doing a completely different job, a different construction job and we want to build a new team and try to be as prominent as possible in all the games we play,” Miguel Méndez completed.
“THE UKRAINIAN-RUSSIAN WAR IS A TREMENDOUS THING”
Since 2018, Miguel Méndez has been coaching Yekaterinburg, a team with which he dominated European basketball and with which he won the Euroleague three times, a project that ended abruptly for both him and Alba Torrens after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “The war between Russia and Ukraine is something drastic and it is something tremendous for everyone. In the end, sport is only a part of it, it is true that on a personal level it has been a blow,” he commented.
“We had managed to build something very cool in Yekaterinburg, we had a very good team, which worked together, with a very good atmosphere, round and that lost few games. And this is over, in my case the possibility of training the best players in the world, in such an abrupt manner is still a blow,” he declared.
Looking ahead to the next season, he will return to Italy, where he already trained between 2013 and 2017, to manage Virtus Bologna. “It is a project under construction, a very young section, they have been in the top division for almost three years and they want to build little by little. I know from experience that it is not easy to have a men’s team that has won a title last year and that it is a historic player in European and Italian basketball. Putting the seed of women’s basketball there is not easy, but we’re going to see if we can do it”, he explained.
Next season, in addition, there will be the atypical situation that both the men’s coach, Sergio Scariolo, and the women’s, will train the same club and will not be Spanish, something that Méndez downplays. “It is curious to have a club that has a high-level men’s section and a women’s section. That is what there are not many. From there Sergio (Scariolo) is Italian and that he works in one of the best Italian teams is not news And that I arrive at an Italian team, which I have already worked four years there, is not news either,” he assured.
“THREE OR FOUR YEARS AGO ALMOST EVERYONE PLAYED OUTSIDE”
Miguel Méndez also valued the return of national talent to the Endesa Women’s League. “In recent years many of the players who were away have returned, because the situation was that three or four years ago practically the entire senior team played outside the country,” he said.
“Many of them are coming back, that makes the league more powerful. There is a 16-team league, which is the only league in Europe with so many teams, which makes it very competitive, very demanding and very salable. We hope to continue selling the product of women’s basketball in the best possible way,” he concluded.