From Satnam to Princepal, LBA proves to be a vehicle of change
CHANDIGARH: Gurwinder Singh’s father is a daily wage labourer from Malout, a cotton-producing town in Punjab not far from the Pakistan border. Nishandeep Singh’s father works in the town as a roadside bike mechanic. Mandeep Singh, who is from the city of Moga, lost his alcoholic father in his early teens; his mother supported the family as a seamstress.
Gurwinder and Mandeep, both 21, are now in the Indian Navy. Nishandeep, 22, is with the army. All three have had a close brush with abject poverty, and were lifted out of it by one thing--basketball. They were all part of the junior national gold medal-winning Punjab team in 2017, a win that brought them to their jobs, and they all started with the sport at the Ludhiana Basketball Academy (LBA), a centre par excellence that has produced over 40 international players, and sent four of them to the NBA development program, Princepal Singh being the latest. “LBA is the best academy in the country. And it is only because of my well laid foundation during my stint at the academy that I was able to make it to NBA G-league,” says Princepal, who had no exposure to basketball till he joined the academy in 2015 as a lanky 14-year-old.
A lifeline for the marginalised and economically backward in rural Punjab, LBA has been scouting out exceptionally tall and athletic teenagers from villages to turn them into top basketball players for over 15 years. If you know the name of an Indian basketball player, chances are he came through LBA. Heard of Satnam Singh, who was the country’s first player ever to be drafted to the NBA (D League) in 2015? He learnt to play at LBA. In 2016, the academy’s Palpreet Singh Brar was picked by the NBA development league franchise. Amyjot Singh was picked by Oklahoma City Blue, the development team of the NBA franchise ‘Oklahoma City Thunder’ in 2017.
A GOOD START
“We began the academy to not only produce top-class cagers, but also to uplift the country’s basketball standards. Princepal’s selection in the NBA G-league is the dividend of the hard work put in by the academy’s coaches,” says former Basketball Federation of India (BFI) president RS Gill, who started the academy in 2002. “Now, we have four players from the academy who have been drafted in the NBA development leagues. We hope more from the academy make it to the NBA courts in the coming years,” says Gill, who retired as a Director General of Police, Punjab.
Two years after its founding, two trainees from the academy’s first batch made it to the junior India team. Since then, there has been no Indian age-group team without an LBA player in its ranks. Another boost came during the 2011 Asian Basketball
Championship in Wuhan, China, when half the India men’s squad drew its strength from the academy. The credit of Punjab winning two successive senior national championships in the last two years too goes to the academy. “Former India coach S Subramanian is the person behind the rise of LBA. He was the first coach-in-charge of the academy,” says Gill. Subramanian passed away in 2013. “In the FIBA Asia Cup qualifiers held earlier this year, the last international championship in which an India team participated, there were four players—Princepal Singh, Aman Sandhu, Amritpal Singh and Jagdeep Bains—from the academy in the 12-member squad,” says academy chief coach Rajinder Singh, a former Services and Indian team coach.
MORE THAN A SCHOOL
Not everyone who passes through LBA makes it to the national level, but for most trainees, it’s a chance to make a real change to their lives.
“Most of our trainees are from very humble backgrounds. The hunger to achieve something in life and to improve the socio-economic status of their families is the driving force behind the success of our trainees,” says Teja Singh Dhaliwal, secretary of the Punjab Basketball Association. “Till date, over 80 of our trainees have got jobs under the sports quota in various government departments, including Railways, Army and Punjab Police.”