How s.Oliver Würzburg wants to try to survive in the Bundesliga. The season starts in October with the Cup qualifier, where difficult opponents await.
“It was my summer!” Denis Wucherer laughs heartily when he says that. The hot season was a very successful one for the head coach of Bundesliga basketball team s.Oliver Würzburg. The amateur golfer reduced his handicap from a good 13 to 6.9. In the case of club swingers, this figure expresses the potential potential of a golfer, i.e. how well one can theoretically play – if everything goes well. If Wucherer wanted to transfer this detail of his hobby to his job, he would soon reach his limits. Even if basketball players pay homage to the numbers – you can neither bring your individual players, much less the new team, to such a simple denominator as a handicap. Even if Wucherer is convinced that his boys can play well. At least in theory – if everything goes well.
The 47-year-old describes the task of putting together a team that is suitable for the Bundesliga with half the budget as a “very big challenge”. Wucherer and his assistant Steven Key have invested “a lot of effort and a lot of time” in order to find good guys who also fit our character, coupled with a reasonable quality to have a serious Bundesliga team.
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Thanks to Corona, of course, everything is different than usual – and not only the baskets are a bigger surprise bag than in the recent past, this time it’s the whole league. Usurer expects that the big ones will stay big and that the gap between Berlin and Munich, Ludwigsburg and Oldenburg will widen even further, that a few teams that one might not necessarily expect from the name, such as Hamburg, will be washed up. And then there are some clubs “that are in a similar situation to us”. The Baskets have “survived the summer”, says Wucherer, now it is a matter of “surviving in the Bundesliga”.
Everyone welcomed the two trainers to the first public training session on Wednesday, including the two Americans who were still in quarantine when training started last week because one had a positive corona test and the other was sitting with him in the plane and taxi. Players, coaches and supervisors are tested for Sars-CoV-2 once a week. Usurer is satisfied with the fitness level of his players, who according to the tests at the university is “similar to last year”. The team has become younger (after the departures of the experienced Wells, Bowlin, Hulls) – and more athletic, says Usurer.
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One of the people you can tell by now is Joshua Obiesie. The 20-year-old spent a lot of the training and play-free time in the gym and put on a lot of physical activity. He has become more robust, praises his trainer, who expects the talent to take the “next step” just like Nils Haßfurther, who is only a year older. The two youngsters will play more important roles than last season. Obiesie is looking forward to it: It is a “mega-feeling” to be able to “finally train properly again” after almost six months. He wants to try to be “the best player I can be to help the team” and he also has the confidence to become “a leader”. He had “learned a lot” from the playmaker colleagues who had emigrated and, above all, “improved his defense”. Obiesie is looking forward to an “interesting season” starting with the Cup qualification tournament (four groups of four) in mid to late October.
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The Würzburg team will have to deal with hosts Ulm, Bamberg and Ludwigsburg in their group, the exact schedule will be announced. “If it’s too easy, it’s no fun,” says Obiesie. “Los luck looks different,” says Felix Hoffmann. But that’s nothing new for the baskets, who have a subscription to the most difficult opponents in the first round in the cup. At 31, the new father Hoffmann is now the most experienced in the team and, as the father of the company, has always been a kind of integration officer for the newcomers. He describes “the boys” as “interesting and promising”, who are now to be lifted to Bundesliga level as quickly as possible. Hoffmann hopes that the team can compensate for the lost experience by playing even faster.
One of the few Würzburgers with long Bundesliga experience is Florian Koch, who is happy to be able to play in Würzburg for at least another year because he and his girlfriend now feel at home and at home in the cathedral city. He calls the Baskets project “Jugend forscht” and knows: “Surely not an easy task to survive in the league.” Nevertheless, he is “deeply relaxed”, also with regard to his presumably new role as the team’s leader. “A role like this comes naturally when you take on responsibility and pass on your experience and you exemplify professionalism,” he believes. “We have to pull out our strengths, to be younger and faster and then solve difficult situations as a team,” says Koch.
When the conversations are held at a distance and with a mask, usurer only shouts goodbye: “Stay negative!” And laughs.
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