Zico Coronel has a burning desire to become better as a professional basketball coach so he has no qualms about straying well outside his comfort zone.
Coronel, who is on the cusp of making his National Basketball League (NBL) debut as head coach of the Taylor Corporation Hawks team, is in Spain.
The 34-year-old career assistant coach, who has deputised with remarkable success for 13 years in the NBL, has been going back and forth between Barcelona and Valencia by high-velocity trains, to broaden his horizon in a bid to watch the elite professional teams train and compete in their league.
But Coronel isn’t there in the hope of securing the signature of pedigree players for the Hawke’s Bay franchise team.
“It’s not to scout players but to improve as a coach,” explains the health and PE teacher at Rongotai College in Wellington.
Clocking the mileage has been a mind-boggling but immensely liberating exercise for someone who is prepared to leave no stone unturned in trying to make a memorable first impression as NBL head coach.
“To fly from Barcelona to Madrid would take about an hour 20 and it takes about four hours 45 on the train so by the time you factor in going to the airport and doing the security to get back into the inner city, it’s not particularly different to getting on a train.”
He could have gone to the glitz and glamour of the United States but he’s done that “multiple times”. The challenge isn’t that imposing considering the Americans speak English and their culture is “pretty similar to ours”.
In Spain, he says, the brand of basketball differs to here and there’s the obvious language and culture barriers but, he emphasises, it needn’t be if the code becomes the currency for growth.
No doubt, Coronel is looking at bringing a different perspective to his approach.
“Basketball is like a universal language in many ways. You can understand a lot even if you don’t know the Catalan, the Galacian or Castilian words with all the regional dialects here.”
Last month he observed the voting for the push for Catalan independence but, funnily enough, basketball made more sense to him.
“With different ideas and ways of doing things, when you think about basketball, it stimulates thoughts about different things.”
He impresses it doesn’t offer magical solutions but simply different avenues to tackle situations.
Spanish league players ply their trade well into June so their schedule clashes with the New Zealand one.
Coronel says the elite Spanish muster can be of NBA potential in the US so fiscally it becomes another ball game if the NBL enters that arena for a scrimmage.
“They’re probably making more in a month then we’ll be able to pay them for a whole season.”
He left on December 15 and returns to New Plymouth on January 16 before making a beeline for a national coaches’ convention in Auckland on January 18-19.
From there he’ll immerse himself in the national age-group camp in Rotorua next month where the talent will be exposed to programmes that will help them with making the transition to higher echelons.
So does Coronel envisage serving an exotic Spanish flavour through the Hawks when the NBL tips off in April?
“Basketball is basketball,” he says, feeling any efforts to dress it up any other way will prove to be a futile exercise.
His newly appointed Hawks first lieutenant, Morgan Maskell, of Auckland, has been conducting affairs in Napier, including orchestrating a pre-Christmas taster for the players here, and the feedback pleases him.
In November he also reappointed Kaine Hokianga, of Hastings, who shared two seasons with Coronel in the Manawatu Jets’ stable in 2008-09.
Coronel is indebted to FC Barcelona Bàsquet youth team director Pere Capdevila Bernaus, who has represented his country in five games, and Valencia Basket scouting co-ordinator Manolo Gramage for making sacrifices to make his experience a productive and memorable one.
He will have watched games and trainings involving Gran Canaria, Unicaja, Oviedo, Estudiantes, Obradoiro, Panathinaikos (Athens), Badalona, Fuenlabrada, CSKA Moscow, Real Madrid, Fenerbache (Turkey, EuroLeague champions) and Zaragoza as well.
Spain has a stratified structure whereby there’s a clear pathway from the junior age groups to the professional tier with most clubs housing a second team.
The Liga Endesa (ACB) is the top professional division with 18 teams. A promotion-relegation system sees the bottom dropping to the LEB Oro (gold, 16 teams) and via the same criteria from here to the LEB Plata (silver, 16 teams).
The purity of basketball there, launched on a mission statement of entertainment, he believes make it a more enjoyable spectacle for casual spectators than other leagues.
Coronel’s ancestry goes back to the historic city of Segovia, northwest of Madrid. He has made a pilgrimage of sorts to the autonomous region of Castile and León, Spain, famous for its magnificent Roman aqueduct and for its cathedral, one of the last Gothic temples to be built in Europe.
“Unfortunately it’s on Christmas break but I’ve walked the streets to the monastery and the burial grounds of a unique world heritage city,” he says of a palace there that has lured Disney for a film location.