Basketball has always been one of the most popular sports in Angola. With normality returning to the country after years of civil war, the African country is beginning to dominate the sport in the continent once again.
Basketball as a part of daily life remained consistent even through the troubled years of Angola. That's probably why it came to be the most successful basketball nation in African history, winning the African Championship nine times. Their two biggest teams, Primeiro de Agosto and Petro de Luanda, are both based in the capital Luanda. The big two not only dominate the domestic league, but have also competed in the last two African Club Championship finals, with the teams winning one each.
The growing Angolan economy allows the government and corporations to invest for basketballers to play professionally. The best players tend to stay in the country, while foreign players are drawn there. Shannon Crooks is one of them. He played at the University of Massachusetts and in the Portuguese league before signing for Petro.
Shannon Crooks, foreign player, Petro de Luanda, said, "There's still some people that I don't want to say are naive but are uninformed about Africa in general. They think it's still like lions and things running around, but I knew some people from Angola through Portugal and what to expect. But everywhere around the world people are the same, it's just a different language. There's a good side to everything and a bad side to everything."
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment