Uniting the world through basketball

At first glance, the 42 teenage boys going through drills and playing supervised pick-up games at Our Lady of the Lake University’s Mabee Gym appear to be cogs in the never-ending prep basketball machine.

Clinics, fall leagues, AAU summer tournaments and camps such as this one fill the void between high school seasons.

While many of the campers are from San Antonio and the Hill Country, others are from Romania, Macedonia and Kosovo.

And because of that, Assembly 2015 takes on a different dimension from other camps, much of which is lost on 15- and 16-year-old boys sweating away their days at the camp. Boys of that age are not typically students of nuance.

The boys see the camp, which began Sunday and ends in three days, as a great chance to make new friends and play against different competition.

“It’s great experience,” said Alex Mircean, 16, from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. “It’s a challenge. The sport is played differently in the USA.”

It’s the first international camp for Mircean, as well as the first such camp for Kobe Magee, 16, who will be a junior guard at Brandeis.

“(The European) players bring different moves that are different from what I’ve seen before,” Magee said.

“Most of them,” says Samuel Kearns, 16, a Clemens senior, “will dribble twice, then look to pass.”

Kearns and Magee thought this was odd, and thus Assembly 2015 proves some eternal basketball truths.

American players are more developed athletically and more explosive, said Kaan Alplay of Istanbul, Turkey, one of the camp’s coaches. The international players, he said, are easier to coach.

Mixing the two, he said, helps both sides learn from the other. The goal? Look at the Spurs, a team that mixes Euroleague style with American nasty.

But there’s a bigger prize at stake for Chris Dial, the former girls basketball coach at Schertz John Paul II and executive director of The Basketball Embassy, the San Antonio-based company sponsoring the camp.

“Basketball is one of the best tools that the world has at its disposal to bring people together,” said Dial, who also is head of the Kosovo Basketball Federation. “These guys don’t realize it now, but they’re building lifelong friendships.”

The concept of using sports to bridge political and cultural gaps isn’t new. Pundits dubbed it “ping-pong diplomacy” in 1971 when the American table tennis team visited China. Scholars credit those ping-pong matches with thawing chilly relations between the two countries that had existed for decades.

It still works.

Dial told the story of a trip across borders a year ago. A particularly belligerent military officer didn’t take a shine to the carload of Americans at his gate.

That is until he learned that the Americans were coaches heading to teach a youth clinic in that region.

The mood lightened considerably. Dial even lined up the soldiers manning the gate and ran them through some basketball drills, much to the commander’s delight.

Even now, he says basketball defuses the red-tape land mines of international diplomacy.

A Belarusian Basketball Federation official emailed Dial to inquire about his camps. She felt compelled to acknowledge tense relations between the U.S. and Belarus and her hope that diplomatic barriers wouldn’t affect basketball.

Dial’s answer: No problem.

“We’re not about politics or government,” Dial said. “We don’t roll into a gym waving the American flag. We’re all about basketball.”