Izan Almasa Pérez (Murcia, June 7, 2005) has earned himself one of the great realities of world basketball despite the fact that he is barely 18 years old. The successes he has achieved with the Spanish teams in the last two summers, which have come together with his proclamation as the best player in the three international championships he has played, the U-17 World Cup, the U-18 European Championship and the U-18 World Cup, have become the leader of a new generation of national basketball gold.
Almansa still has the face of a child, but this coming season he is already going to compete with professionals in the G-League in the United States before making the leap to the NBA, where they already assume that he will be in the 2024-2025 campaign. But to get to this point, this boy who grew up in the Infante neighborhood of Murcia, son of Cristina Pérez Almansa, has worked hard on the three cornerstones of any athlete: physique, technique and head.
Izan Almansa didn’t really want to play basketball. He was passionate about soccer in his childhood. In fact, he was playing in the Plus Ultra of Llano de Brujas despite the fact that in Jesuitinas, where he studied, he was more than a head taller than all his classmates and there were many teachers who tried, some unsuccessfully, to get him to try basketball. . His size was such when he was barely eight years old that they had to put him in a special desk because of his long legs and it didn’t take long for him to run into the doorframe when he arrived at the classrooms.
His mother tried to convince him to switch to the sport of the basket and one summer he enrolled in a campus run by former player Quini García at the Colegio San Jorge, in La Alcayna. The attempt was unsuccessful because he returned to football. At school he noticed his then Physical Education teacher, Pepín, who was a goalkeeper for ElPozo Murcia futsal. But when he went to secondary school, he fell into the hands of Rafa Arias, former player and coach, son of Braulio Arias, the first titled coach in the Region’s history. He was a key figure in his sports career because he got in touch with Javier Muñoz, who was the youth academy manager at CB Murcia at the time, and told him about Izan.
At the club they gave him a couple of shirts to see if he would dare to play basketball. But they didn’t get it with that gift either. Instead, the change came about thanks to the fact that several of his friends joined the juvenile team led by Xavi Alarcón and that was how he began to score his first baskets. His progression was spectacular and this is attested by technicians such as Nino Solana, Andrés Media and Carmen Puigcever, who were polishing a diamond that quickly entered the radar of the Spanish Basketball Federation’s modernization programs.
Izan Almansa, who has a brother -Dani- who plays for Maristas, began to stand out at UCAM Murcia, a club where he completed the juvenile and infant stages. His outstanding performances in the Spanish Championships with the Murcian teams aroused the interest of the best clubs in the country. Real Madrid was the fastest and in the summer of 2019 they incorporated him into their second cadet team. And he barely took a year to jump to the junior team despite not being of age and even making his debut in the EBA League.
But if UCAM Murcia had to resign themselves to losing their young pearl, the same thing also happened to Real Madrid despite all the club’s potential. From the United States, he received a call from the Overtime Elite Academy in Atlanta, which is sponsored by several NBA players, including the Catalan Paul Gasol and Lebron James. For two years Almansa has been able to progress working alongside young talents from all over the world, in addition to receiving financial remuneration and being able to continue with his academic training.
The summer of 2022 showed the whole world the great strides made in its first season in the United States. In the U-17 World Cup, which was held in Malaga, he led the Spanish team that was proclaimed runner-up with averages of 12.1 points and 13 rebounds. He was named the best player of the championship. And a month later, with the U-18 team, in the European Championship held in Turkey, Spain was champion with an outstanding Izan Almansa, who was also the MVP of the tournament with 15.7 points and 10.7 rebounds.
The 2022-2023 academic year has been the last for Izan Almansa at the Overtime Academy, where he has not stopped growing on a sporting and personal level, as was evident at the World Cup in Debrecen, in Hungary, where he was once again the leader of the national team that won the gold medal with the Murcian, once again, chosen the best player in the championship with averages of 16.9 points, 7.1 rebounds, 1.6 assists and 1.7 recoveries.
Thanks to his performances this summer, he has been able to train with NBA players in Fuengirola, where he has «been with Donovan Mitchell (Cleveland Cavaliers) and Jaylen Brown (Boston Celtics), among others. Being with them has allowed me to see their rhythm of play and has helped me to become aware that I have to work hard to play against them”, says Almansa, who has also had the opportunity to work for a few days with the members of the national team. absolute Spanish, in which he could already debut next summer, within the Golden Boy 2.0 program aimed at those young talents who in the near future will take over from Rudy Fernández, Sergio Llull and Ricky Rubio.
New team and university
Izan Almansa’s life is going to change this coming season. To begin with, he will become a professional player with the Ignite franchise, from the G-League, where he will be for only one year, since next summer he will appear in the draft and make the leap to the NBA. The specialists in the United States already place him among the first fifteen chosen, which would guarantee him a contract of at least three years in the best league in the world. In this way he will become another Spaniard in the American league and, of course, the Murcian who goes the furthest in the world of basketball. But Izan Almansa, despite making the leap to professionalism, will not put aside her academic training, although she will not do so in the United States, but in Spain, through the online program at the San Antonio Catholic University, where she will study Business Administration and Management. Companies. And it is that the Murcian, despite his youth, wants to be an entrepreneur in the future. At the moment, he already has plans to set up a restaurant in Murcia.
2023-07-30 04:50:46
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