2024-10-19 15:28:00
The FFBB even had to refuse «between 100,000 and 110,000» players at the start of the school year following the two silver medals won by French teams at the Paris Games this summer.
The French Basketball Federation (FFBB) announced Saturday that it surpassed its record number of licensees during the 2023-2024 season, set at 765,909, an increase of 5.5%. It had 725,009 in 2022-2023, where there had never been so many licensees.
The current season promises to be even more fruitful: the FFBB had to refuse “between 100,000 and 110,000” players at the beginning of the school year after the two silver medals won this summer by the French teams at the Paris Games – mainly due to insufficient equipment -, specified the president of the FFBB, Jean-Pierre Siutat, during a press point in Paris.
Second team sport after football
In office since 2010, Situat, who will not seek a new mandate at the general assembly on December 14, welcomed basketball‘s place in France, “the second team sport after football”et “He claims that France is a great basketball nation in the world, it wasn’t a given”. “With the end of the Games in France and this outcome, I believe the journey is over” he added.
When asked about the main satisfaction he derives from his 14 years spent at the helm of the FFBB, he underlined “a work”. “It’s not the fact of having succeeded on a bridge or a curve, but of having put the road at service”he continued, inventing a metaphor borrowed from his training as a public works engineer.
He indicated finishing “physically worn out” his last term, especially after having “bad experience” the year 2023. That year, unlike the Olympic summer, the French teams had achieved results below expectations (bronze medal at the European Championships for the Bleues, elimination in the 1st round of the World Cup for the Blues) and, on a personal level, he was defeated for the presidency of the European branch of the International Federation (Fiba Europe).
Jean-Pierre Huckler, first vice-president and general bursar of the FFBB, is expected to succeed him.
“Little by little I gave him the files. He even knows some better than me.”declared the outgoing president.
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