KEY POINTS:
Tab Baldwin has no problem listing some of the great basketball players who have bounced from Auckland's Youthtown into the National League.
There's Warwick Meehl, Byron Vaetoe, Steve Campbell and current Tall Black Lindsay Tait.
It's the potentially great players that passed through that famous facility - formerly
Boystown - that trouble him more. "I hate to think how many potentially great players passed through that gym."
So he's entering a partnership that will go some way to filling those cracks.
The Auckland Stars, of which Baldwin is an owner, have joined forces with Youthtown to become the Youthtown Stars, in what the former Tall Blacks coach says should have far-reaching effects for New Zealand basketball.
It's like the perfect marriage between New Zealand's most successful basketball franchise - the Stars have won seven of the past nine NBL titles - and the spiritual home of Auckland youth basketball. Baldwin admits it will help foster some personal ambitions.
"My focus is not the Tall Blacks now but it is, and will probably always remain, basketball in New Zealand. There is a push to restructure basketball at a grass roots level through the regions in Auckland. In that restructuring a place has been identified for the Auckland Stars to assist the regional basketball bodies with training at the elite level.
"Youthtown has always been where the best young kids in Auckland went to play."
Baldwin and Youthtown executive director Keith Thorpe have formalised that arrangement.
"My coaching philosophies have been driven through the Auckland Stars and now we want to drive that right into the elite young players right through Auckland."
Baldwin says this is not a threat, or competition to associations like Counties-Manukau or Auckland. He wants them to send their best players to train with the Stars then return to their representative sides.
"We're trying to create a pathway to professionalism for aspiring, elite young basketball players."
On raw talent alone, Baldwin sees no reason why New Zealand kids shouldn't be as skilled and talented as those in the US, Europe and Australia. He says New Zealand has inherent advantages that have never been fully utilised.
"We've missed the boat in this country. Because we're so small we can control so much more. When you get into a large situation you lose control, you lose that centralisation. We haven't taken advantage of that because we haven't developed an industry of coaches.
"Hopefully, with stronger regional associations linking through competition and development programmes, and the Stars and our programme at Youthtown sitting as the point of the sphere, we can take this body of knowledge and body of coaches and take it to a small population of players."
As for a hands-on role, Baldwin says it will be no more than sporadic. He'll design schemes and programmes for the development of players, but more importantly coaches, but he still has aspirations to coach professionally in Europe.
That's been put on hold this year while he gets this project off the ground and spends a bit of quality time with his family, but the coaching fire still burns brightly.
- HERALD ON SUNDAY
