On 24 September 2009, Inter-regional Championship of IES-BASKET School Basketball League opened in Yoshkar-Ola (the Mari El Republic). Within the framework of this event, IES-BASKET and the government of the Mari El Republic have organized a School Basketball Festival - the first ever in modern Russia - under the slogan YOUR GAME - YOUR DREAM! Forty-eight teams of young boys and girls from 24 regions of Russia take part in the event. The National Basketball Project and Students Basketball Association are the partners of the festival.  The Festival program includes competitions in three basketball styles: basketball, street basketball and Peter-basket (three-basket basketball), as well as discotheques, contests, recitals and concerts for participants and guests.
At the opening ceremony participants of the festival were greeted by Aleksandr Frolov, General Director of IES-BASKET School Basketball League, IES-Holding Vice Present, and Vladimir Chumakov, Minister of Sport, Culture and Tourism of the Mari El Republic. Famous national and international basketball players were invited to take part in the festival: Olympic champion Sergey Belov, Euro League champion Sergey Panov, an NBA living legend, former player of Los Angeles Lakers A.C. Green, and a famous American coach Robert Michael Fratello. They conduct master-classes and seminars for coaches and players. NBA representatives - Arturas Karnisovas, Sophie Goldschmidt and Alvidas Pazdrazdis - have arrived together with the American sportsmen. A.C. Green visited Medvedevskaya School and Baumansky Lyceum. His appearance in the school gyms created great excitement among school children and teachers. Together with Alvidas Pazdrazdis, A.C. Green taught the children how to play good basketball. Meanwhile, Mike Fratello and Arturas Karnisovas were visiting some other schools in Yoshkar-Ola where they got a very warm welcome. On the first day of the event, girls' basketball preliminaries selected quarter-finalist teams from the Omsk Region, Perm Region, Udmurtia Republic, Penza Region, and Komi Republic. Boys's preliminaries selected quarter-finalist teams from the Nizhny Novgorod Region, Ulyanovsk Region, Samara Region, Udmurtia, and Slavyansk-on-Kuban. The teams from Novosibirsk Region, Bashkortostan, Saratov Region and Penza Region will play on 25 September 2009. An unofficial game between the combined team of Festival participants and famous Russian politicians and businessmen will be held at the end of the Festival. |
