With the FIBA Asia Challenge Cup 2016 looming, and with most Filipino fans eyeing up the replenished Gilas Pilipinas 5.0, the Nationals have been busy preparing during the past few weeks.
Given only a span of two weeks to prepare for the upcoming cagefest, head coach Josh Reyes remains pleased and upbeat with the way his players are learning the team’s system.
“We’re coming along as good as we can, given the time that we have,” said Reyes, after Thursday night’s practice session at the Meralco Gym in Pasig City.
“I think we’re progressing into maximum capacity.”
However, Reyes still wishes Gilas could have been granted a longer time to train for the Challenge Cup, which will raise its’ curtain on September 9 in Tehran, Iran.
“Siyempre ideally we could have had a longer preparation so we can tackle more things, we can have backups to our offensive gameplans and defensive schemes but we don’t have that.
“We don’t have the luxury of having a lot of time to put a lot of things and work out,” he stressed.
But despite the limited timeframe, the TNT KaTropa assistant coach lauded the amateur players’ work ethic every night during workouts.
“But having said that, I’m impressed with the effort, the focus, and the willingness of everybody to learn and to really lock in on practice,” he furthered.
Reyes is happy not only with the players’ performance in practices, but also with the way they play during tune-up matches, which helps them develop and work as a single unit.
“I’m quite happy. We’re working a lot on our pressure defense and our press.
“Mahirap i-press yung UAAP teams because they’re already about to begin their tournament and they’re in peak form already, and yung mga plays nila in place na.”
“That’s how you like your tune-ups to be and I thought we did well, given the time we had to prepare for those tune-ups. Marami pang nangangapa, but the good thing about that is we were able to look at those games. We were able to look at videos and that helped us clean up a lot of things and address a lot of problems with our system,” Reyes added.
Gilas 5.0 will fly to Iran next week, September 6, for the 2016 FIBA Asia Challenge Cup slated on September 9-18.
