Former Nigerian women’s senior basketball team head coach, Sam Vincent, has joined the coaching staff at Rwandan franchise APR ahead of the Basketball Africa League Finals’ fifth season, set to take place in Pretoria, South Africa, this weekend.
61-year-old Vincent assumed the role as head coach of modest South African franchise, MBB, on February 4 this year. However, they were eliminated alongside Kenyan outfit, Nairobi City Thunder, during the BAL Nile Conference qualifiers held in Kigali, Rwanda last month, leaving him available to take up the temporary role with APR as their new defensive coach.
An NBA champion with the Boston Celtics during his playing career, Vincent won two FIBA Women’s AfroBasket titles with Nigeria’s D’Tigress in 2003 and 2017, and intends to remain as MBB’s head coach after his stint with APR and help build South Africa’s grassroots basketball structure.
“I’m always wearing a lot of different hats, so I’m enjoying this connection with APR. I’m enjoying working with their coach and the organisation,” Vincent spoke to ESPN. “I think, as I spoke with Coach Maye and talked about how this all came about, there was some appreciation for the progress with MBB and how the team performed.”
He added, “I think that showed, obviously, some abilities from a coaching staff standpoint to organise a team that was very competitive in its first year, won some tough games and had a chance to win others.”
The former Charlotte Bobcats man went on to say, “I think that was recognised by James Maye as something that could be an addition to what APR is doing. My plan at this point is to continue as MBB head coach. This APR job was an opportunity to obviously gain more experience of what the finals look like, the next level of competition. I’ll be on the ground, in the games, doing the scouting, working with the team, so for me, it’s even more preparation for how I continue to build the MBB team.”
APR will face defending champions Petro de Luanda for the right to be the fifth seed in the playoffs on June 7 at SunBet Arena. They will then face either Tunisian outfit US Monastir or Nigerian franchise Rivers Hoopers in the quarter-finals in straight knockout tournament, which will come to a conclusion with the final on June 14.
Vincent makes yet another return to South Africa, whom he led to a ninth-place finish at the 2003 AfroBasket championship, their joint-best ever position to date. He also led D’Tigress to the Athens 2004 Olympic Games in Greece, where they defeated Korea 68-64 to become the first African country to win a game at the Olympiad and he also oversaw the men’s team D’Tigers to the second round of the FIBA World Championship (now FIBA World Cup) in 2006.