Serbian coaching school
Honestly, Aleksandar Djordjevic, Nenad Petronic and I don’t accept when someone uses the term “so-called” for the Serbian Coaching School. The outcomes of school, are so great that the school firstly deserves to be recognized by us, the Serbs, for something that was already deeply rooted, continued, and did not certainly occur by accident. Having in mind all of these, we would like to give our point of view on how we perceive and understand the “Serbian basketball coaching school”.
CREATORS AND FOLLOWERS
Aleksandar and I were lucky enough to listen to genuine stories from its creators about the origin of the Serbian Coaching School under different conditions. Firstly, I heard them from Mr. Ranko Zeravica because I had an opportunity to work with him for the first time during the 80s, and later on we had been collaborating as long as he was alive. Moreover, in the 90s, I was also working in Munich for two years while Mr. Borislav Stankovic was the general secretary of FIBA, whose headquarters was also located there. On the other side, Aleksandar has been a player for years being in contact with our best coaches. At the same time, he received valuable information from his father Bratislav as well. Those were opportunities to listen to long stories about the history of the Serbian Coaching School. Accordingly, both of us learned and memorized from those stories that gentlemen Ranko Zeravica, Nebojsa Popovic, Borislav Stankovic and Aleksandar Nikolic were the founders of the Serbian Coaching School. Each of them individually made an immeasurable contribution to the creation of specific methodologies by which they improved the players and the way of playing the game of basketball. This greatly affirmed the basketball players and at the same time achieved the competitive result of the teams they led at that time referring especially to national selections.
Furthermore, because they used the most useful experiences of the original Serbian Coaching School, we can freely say that its most famous followers are certainly Dusan Ivkovic, Svetislav Pesic, Bozidar Maljkovic, Dusan Vujosevic, Zeljko Obradovic and the last of its offspring and co-participant of this work, Aleksandar Djordjevic. These coaches have won more medals at the Olympic Games, World, and European National Team Championships, as well as club international competitions than the rest of the world. Additionally, they have helped produce more NBA players [ except in the US ] than all other coaches combined. Eventually, they together achieved continuity that confirmed the world dominance of the Serbian Coaching School.