SAN JUAN (William Rosario's Somewhere in the Americas) - The thing that I love most about the crazy Liga de las Americas experience every year is actually the same thing that sometimes tests my endurance when it comes to the competition.

It's a 10-week period with seven hosting cities and a 40-game calendar that can become exhausting. But then there is that wonderful opportunity to become a silent observer of the real basketball situation in each country. And it doesn't happen over the course of a year. It is the fact of coming back, season after season, that reveals whatever reality the game is going through at that moment in the country.

This is beautiful. It is where the future of basketball lies. FIBA tournaments are not responsible for the growth of the game in a country or a region. A common mistake is to have that be an excuse for the troubles or obstacles the game faces in each particular situation. National teams are not responsible either. In the present (and hopefully this will change in 2017), these tournaments and the national team can only be of learning or growing experience to 12 to 24 players over a four- maybe five-week period. That's not enough.

The game has to be developed in the country, in the national federation and its different leagues. That's where you have continuity and the chance to have a real impact in the presence of basketball in every day life.

So it's really frustrating to come across a constant narrative in all these travels I have been on and all the silent observations I have made in the last couple of years: the basketball makers throughout the Americas are rarely thinking about the betterment of the game in the country and are usually thinking about themselves, about their team in the national league, their political position within the national federation and their self-worth and possibilities in taking part of the national team experience here or there. The Americas basketball scene is mostly made up of selfish people.

I've heard this sentiment expressed in one way or another in every country I've visited in this Liga de las Americas context. How sad and tragic. Like I said before, these people are the ones really responsible and making basketball happen every day for months in their respective countries.

It's pretty apparent when one looks over the national league landscape in our continent.

An Argentinean colleague of mine recently mentioned it when talking about the country's national league: "You have a couple of teams now that are using the persecution card when it comes to some decisions that have not gone their way. They attack the current leadership by saying they are only focusing on hurting them and their championship chances within the structure. But it's a joke. Because when they were in leadership positions a couple years back, they took the exact same measures and the other teams said the same thing back. There's no integrity, nobody looking at how the league can grow. They are just thinking about themselves."

In Puerto Rico and Venezuela, there's currently an open discussion about why their national leagues do not adapt to the FIBA calendar. I talked to Capitanes de Arecibo (Puerto Rico) owner Luis Monrouzeau about his thoughts on why it hasn't been done and he plainly told me: "Because both the winning and the losing teams don't want to disrupt whatever they have going on inside their organizations. I have stood up in meetings and told them how they are going to make more money and have more presence if we adapt to the FIBA calendar and they immediately go to me wanting to have this because it makes my team even stronger. And I tell them I don't care, I want the league to be stronger, but they don't believe me."

I'm in Cancun, Mexico this week and was just driven to my hotel by one of the directors of the Pioneros club who told me: "It was my turn in the meeting prior to the beginning of the playoffs in our national league and I expressed my desire to have the playoff calendar be pushed one day because of this Liga de las Americas weekend and they said no. I quickly figured I was thinking about how my team was going to be representing the league in the most important club competition we have in our continent, and it had not even crossed their minds. They just wanted our team to have as many games as we could in a shorter amount of days to have the advantage of us being exhausted and have better possibilities to beat us. They are not thinking about the collective. So we cannot grow."

And then we ask ourselves why we cannot get it together when it comes to development of basketball in the Americas. The people that are making basketball don't care about basketball. Why would it grow?

We need unity. Like Brazil has unity. That national league and those teams are very clear on the common goal being more important. A unified national league means a stronger product, more possibilities for support because of that stronger product, more exposure with that support and more kids growing up wanting to be part of it thanks to that exposure.

With more kids, and basketball having more of a presence in the different countries, one can start to talk about growth. More professionals around the sport that can make a real living doing it, more player talent development possibilities, and fans having a real education about the game.

Sounds like a utopia - my utopia.

I'll settle for unity. Let's try and begin by thinking as a unit. Please.

William Rosario

FIBA

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