The tournament was hosted by basketball-mad Slovenia, with four six-team First Round groups in different areas of the country. They had a main reporter in each location (the fantastic Dimi, for me) and then needed an assistant for things like grabbing a player for YouTube post-match, getting quotes from the press conferences, and doing features.
My inexperience showed at times, with the likes of Rudy Fernandez and Roko Ukic getting frustrated with me (my interview with Rudy never even got anywhere I don't think, but the Roko piece ended up here - it was just unfortunate that we weren't able to liaise effectively with the Croatian press officer to find a better time to do it).
But generally we did pretty well - I owe a lot in that regard to the fantastic Rihards, who put in the real skilled work behind the camera to make the interviews actually come out decent.
Our First Round group featured Spain, Slovenia, Croatia, Georgia, Czech Republic and Poland. My Czechs were starting to build something nice around their great young stars Jan Vesely and Tomas Satoransky, pushing the hosts close on opening night.
Aside from them and the obvious star power of Spain (who crushed Croatia in the first game), I was immediately drawn to the Georgians, who had a few nice players and competed with great passion. Five years later (May 2018), their coach Igor Kokoskov has just been named to his NBA head-coaching role - it's easy to see why. He was very impressive through the tournament, although they ended up failing to qualify.
We had to do a few video pieces from our group, and we were very aware that Spain and Slovenia would be perfect for pieces later in the tournament. So when Georgia beat Poland in their opener, we swiftly arranged an interview with Viktor Sanikidze, a great player and a really nice guy:
On the second day, Croatia rallied to pip Georgia, before Czech Republic delivered a crushing blow to Poland (who were left reeling after losing to the two "easier" opponents in the group), and then the hosts beat Spain in a fantastic atmosphere.
We grabbed Czech match-winner Lubos Barton for an interview the next day, and I was really happy when he spotted me later in the week in the hotel and thanked me for the nice piece (I thanked him too of course, and to be fair again, the credit should certainly go to the wonderful Rihards over me - I just asked the questions, Rihards was the professional who made it look good!).
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| View from the top, with our hotel (hidden) to the left |
Croatia and Spain eventually made it to the semis, though they both lost, with Spain beating Croatia in the bronze-medal game. Slovenia were knocked out by eventual winners France in the quarter-finals.
I ended up writing a bit of a summary of my time and my experiences for Washington Wizards' fan-site Truth About It, which you can see here.