Sophie Adams (left) and Ashlee Strawbridge will join Riley Sa and Sammy Arnold will be hoping to nail spots in New Zealand teams this weekend. Photo supplied.Two of Basketball Mid Canterbury’s rising stars are off to Auckland this weekend to vie for selection into national teams.

New Zealand’s top young basketball talent will assemble at Auckland’s Pulman Arena for the Basketball New Zealand under-15 and under-17 national team selection camps and among them would be Ashburton’s Riley Sa and Sophie Adams.

Sa and Adams are both Ashburton College students, while Ashlee Strawbridge and Samantha Arnold – two Ashburton girls now attending school in Christchurch – are also taking part in the camp.

Sa is one of 26 under-15 boys selected, while Adams, Arnold and Strawbridge are among 24 under-17 girls selected.

For the under-15 squad members the camp is the final selection camp for the team that will travel to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea to compete in the FIBA Oceania Championships in December. A team of 12 boys and 12 girls will be selected for the Kiwi teams, and the top two teams at the tournament will qualify for next year’s Under-16 Asian Championships.

For those selected for the under-17 squad this year, the camps are the start of the preparation for next year’s FIBA Oceania Championships which will be held in Noumea, New Caledonia, in August.

The national structured camps focus on player monitoring, support and reporting to help monitor athletes, and to develop the new Basketball New Zealand national style of play.

The new development system consisted of three major annual camps: early February, April school holidays and in October over Labour weekend.

High performance director Leonard King said the camps had a more targeted approach, providing athletes with a competitive and challenging environment that allowed development at the highest level possible.

“In years gone by we had some very good people working with the teams, but collectively it was in an unco-ordinated fashion,” King said.

King said the way the camps were managed now allowed progressive teaching layers from under-13 right through to under-19.It wasn’t only New Zealand coaches that were keeping an eye on the national junior teams, either. Globally, the New Zealand age-group teams were getting more global exposure than ever before with New Zealand’s inclusion in the FIBA Asia Zone.

Recently a number of scouts who attended the Schick Championships in Palmerston North stated that the FIBA Oceania Championships, Asia Championships and World Championships were well-followed by US colleges.

Coach Aaron Fearne, who was now with University of North Carolina Charlotte, was one of those coaches.

“We watch tournaments like the FIBA Under 17 Worlds, the Under 19 Worlds, the Asia Qualifying games for the age-groups, and you get to see [players compete] against the Australian kids. A few of those kids on that team are playing some pretty high-level division one programmes, so you get a bit of a comparison there and see how they go against that type of talent,” Ferne said.

Basketball New Zealand would also be hosting Custom College Recruiting for one of the sessions this weekend, to help explain the US college pathway, should players be interested.

© The Ashburton Guardian - 18 October 2018