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Despite is a word the country’s national basketball teams have become infinitely familiar with. Despite not having their best players and coach, the men’s team impressed by winning the South Asian Basketball Championship title and advanced to the Asian Basketball Championship. Now, it’s the turn for our women who were training at the Sree Kanteerava Stadium for the past two weeks in preparation for the 26th FIBAia Championship for Senior women at Wuhan ion China from 29th August to 2nd September 2015 .

Unlike men who missed Scott Flemming who has left the Country, women are lucky to have Francisco Garcia from spain to be back again to coach the team , He is the man who led the women’s team to a fifth and the best ever finish in the ABC 2013, He who have to put up a good show despite everything that’s going on around them .

The 22 member team practicing at Bangalore have the major Participation of Malyalles to have 10 members of malayalles which include , Jeena PS, Stephy Nixon, Anjanaa PG (all from the Kerala State Electricity Board ) Poojamol KS,(Assumption College) Athira m from Kerala Police Smruthi Radhakrishnan ( southern railway in Thiruvanthapuram )Sruthi Menon ( Western Railway)and Jilna Jose ( South central railway Secunderabad) CL Rini from PSG Coimbatore and Apoorva Muralinath ( Southern railway Chennai ) whose mother hails from Kerala . Our men team training for the Senior Asian championship also have two malyalees Basil Philip from central Excise Kochi and Murallekrishna from ONGC Utharkhand also the team is trained by Sebastian P J from the Kerala State Sports Council at mangalore.

According to Franciss Garcia “We have a team this time that will miss arjuna Awardee Geethu Anna Rahul (Anna Jose), our main player in India in fact we don’t have a real substitute for her till now . We are also missing Raspreet Sidhu who could not join the team due to job problems,” and also singh sisters . The coach is trying with certain limitations is trying hard to bring whatever best he can do with the team while all other teams are practicing for more than 3 months or an year our team is here hardly get five weeks before going into a tournament which is not ideal.

“We would have liked some international exposure,” said Garcia.. but “With the infighting in the national federation going on stronger and stronger and without financial support either from Govt nor from IMG Reliance it hasn’t been easy to arrange any foreign exposure trips they need against women from other countries before the championship . Instead, the team will play against men now. ?We have to make do with what we have.

“We want to play friendlier matches against men mainly because the opponents we will face in Wuhan are physically strong and quick. Here only the men can offer us that level of competition,” the coach added another majour problem with the women here is the lack of fitness which we have missing this time with the absence of strength and conditioning coach Tommy Heffelfinger, who played a vital role in keeping the women fit for major tournaments.

But the coach is confident of an impressive finish at the ABC. “Our goal obviously is to stay in Level I. We need to beat Thailand which is ranked one down than us because beating China, Korea, Japan and Chinese Taipei is not an easy task as they are from another basketball galaxy.