Bourousis: “Let’s take basketball higher where it deserves”

Yannis Bourousis expressed his desire to help the development of basketball in Greece in his statements. The veteran basketball player decided to go down to the EEC seniors as a member of the combination, basketball first, led by Panagiotis Fassoulas.

Read what Yannis Bourousis said…



– You are a person who cannot sit still, from the point of view that you are constantly dealing with something new: an athlete, a president and now a candidate in the elections. What motivated you to get involved with the commons of the EEC, at this stage of your life?



“I am of the opinion that as long as you can and have the strength, it is good to offer. On a personal level, I’ve gotten so much from basketball throughout my career, so I kind of feel the need to give back. So as soon as I received the invitation from Panagiotis Fasoulas, I didn’t think much of it and I made the decision to collaborate with the aim of fighting this election together, with the aim and ambition of changing and improving what we consider to be bad writings in Greek basketball ».

– Was the decision to get involved with the elections easy?



“Yeah, I’d say it’s not something I’ve given a second or third thought to. As I told you, I want to give things to the space, from another position now. Two months now, I’ve been running non-stop. From Crete to Didymoteicho, in order to listen to the problems of the amateur associations, to process them so that I have a complete picture of what needs to be done from the very day after the elections. After all, if you don’t know the problem, you can’t solve it.”

– What is the thing that made the biggest impression on you in this trip that you mentioned throughout Greece?



“I will tell you that I was very happy to meet and interact with people who are not professionals, who are involved in basketball and give their souls on a daily basis. It would be a blessing to all who have served basketball, if they ever had the opportunity and the fortune to sit at a table and listen to the anxieties and concerns of these people about amateur sports. Do you know why? Because basically we all think of the pros and the big leagues when we talk about basketball. But it is not so. The base of the sport is its most active and strongest cell. The amateurs and local categories. That’s why we emphasized this from the beginning, in the pre-election process”.

– Is there anything you aspire to change from the very first day in the federation?



“I want to see the stadiums full of children, the infrastructure departments of the teams giving the opportunity to hundreds of thousands of children to do what they love. This implies on the one hand the improvement of facilities, the creation of new ones, but – of course – ensuring movement. This may sound strange to many because they live in large urban centers, but in reality the countryside and particularly rural areas have a big problem. I consider it a shame that in 2024 a child cannot play basketball because there is no money to move from one island to another, or from one village to another. These costs must be covered by the Federation to ensure that there is continuity in the sport and that all children have equal rights in the sport.”

– At the same time you will have to manage, since you are elected as a faction, the hot potato of arbitration.



“Believe me, as an athlete I have experienced what “bad refereeing” means. I fully understand how big the problem is. I see it myself as a sports fan of course. The main thing here is to create the framework that will allow the feeling of justice to exist, to the extent of course that this is possible. There should be a full and continuous evaluation, seminars should be held constantly and mistakes should be pointed out to the referees. And if the phenomenon of a referee having consecutive bad performances is observed, then he should cease from the definitions for a period of time so that he can retrain, improve and if he returns to a better condition. And the referees are part of the match and the sport, so when we talk about quality on the court, of course we include them as well.”

– Is it that simple?



I did not say it is simple, nor do I mean that we will magically get the best referees in Europe. Of course all this will take time. From the “nothing” that exists to date, however, a movement of development and improvement is definitely a step forward to improve the situation in Greece. I’m not dreaming: there will always be those who complain about refereeing decisions. You can’t undo this. But you can show everyone that you are working to reduce the problems and by extension everything is better”.

– Is there something that has troubled you this two months?



“The problems that exist in the area of ​​basketball are widely known. Now I had the opportunity to find out even more. All these years we have been reading about a change of scenery and about new facts, but at the bottom of the matter, I don’t see that anything has changed. Amateur sport faces the same problems, unable to disengage from them. So the time has come for the EEC to provide the solution”.

– On a personal level?



“I have heard things about my decision to participate in the election that saddened me. I’ve said it before: sport is not politics. We must all sit at the same table to improve the existing situation, leaving egos and personal agenda aside. The EEC needs actions, initiatives. We must all work together, hand in hand, to take basketball higher than where it is now.”