Exclusive Interview With Leo Rautins
After entering last summer with lofty expectations, fans of Canada Basketball were in for a rude awakening as the team failed to qualify for the Olympics. Since last summer the head coach of the team, Leo Rautins, would brag to anyone who would listen that his team would qualify for the Olympics.
What happened to his impressive goal for this team?
According to Rautins, the team was doomed by a lack inexperience, some bad luck and not enough funding.
Don’t fret basketball fans, Rautins has a plan to revive a struggling national program and help return it to prominence.
Ryan McNeill: Big summer for your team. You came close to qualifying for the Olympics but came up a little bit short. What’s your impression on the team moving forward?
Leo Rautins: I think you’ve really got to put it into perspective. We had loftier goals that other people… or (we should have) based on our talent. We really thought if everything went perfectly that we’d have a shot to get into the Olympics. Realistically, that was a long shot but that’s what we wanted to go for. From a core standpoint, our (young) guys are gaining experience going through what we’ve gone through the last two summers and we’re heading in the right direction for 2012. We’ve got the World Qualifiers next summer and a lot of different things coming up. I think we’re on pace for what we need to do, but we still have a lot of work ahead of us.
McNeill: You have a nice young core, but because they’re young there have been a lot of growing pains. Talk about how they are growing and maturing.
Rautins: The biggest obstacle we face is we have young talent, but if they don’t have enough games under their belts… the international teams we’re playing against are all weaned on it. Every tournament we can go through (helps us). For example, Joel Anthony of the Miami HEAT is a promising young player. For us, Joel has played three major games in a big tournament and that was this summer. Then we have other younger guys that have gone to two tournaments. So, the more games and the more experience they can go through (the better they’ll get) because this is a different game. Then you see the talent level. I think people forget (how strong international basketball is). You’ve got Roko Ukic with the Raptors. Now, Bryan Colangelo felt strongly enough him to trade away a $40 million point guard. Now Roko’s a backup point guard for Croatia. A backup! If you look at Slovenia, their backup point guard just signed an unprecedented second round contract with Phoenix to backup Steve Nash. But they’re backups. So if you put it in perspective of the talent your kind of playing against, there’s a lot of work we’ve got to put in to develop our young guys to get to that level.
McNeill: You mentioned a desire to play in more tournaments to get your players more experience. Do you have any more tournaments planned before the Worlds next summer?
Rautins: We’re in the process right now of trying to determine our scheduled. Obviously a lot is budget. That’s kind of been a real detriment over the past few years. There’s a lot of things we’d like to do, what we can actually do may be very different. We’d like to have a three phase summer if we can where we’ll bring in some teams and have a teaching and learning session, have a competition segment and have the final competition segment which would be the (Olympic) qualifier towards the latter part of August. Ideally we’d have the majority of the summer to get ready and get in a lot of competition.
McNeill: You mentioned being confided by the lack of a budget. How do you increase that?
Rautins: Obviously you hope that the government supports you and steps up. The second thing is corporate or private sponsorship. That’s a constant battle. It’s a battle because everyone jumps on when win, but to win you need money. And so your in this constant (battle). Everyone says you’ve got to do better, but how do we get a better schedule? How do we get more development going? You need more funds. So, it’s kind of a Catch 22. All you can do is continue to try to pound the pavement, knock on doors and continue to try to get corporate sponsors in. That’s the big thing, the private side really has to step up.
McNeill: Thanks for your time Leo, best of luck with the National Team.
Rautins: No worries, my pleasure.
Click here to listen to the audio version of this interview.
This article was written by:
Ryan McNeill - who has written 208 posts on Hoops Addict.
Ryan McNeill is the editor for Hoops Addict and has appeared on NBA XL and WSRQ 1220. Ryan has covered the NBA with media credentials since the 2007 season.
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