Opals use NSWIS gym to prepare for Asia Cup campaign

The Australian Opals basketball team’s strength and conditioning coach, Brent Goriss, described the New South Wales Institute of Sport’s (NSWIS) gymnasium as the perfect place for the squad to finetune their preparations for the upcoming FIBA Women’s Asia Cup which tips off on June 26.

While basketball isn’t an NSWIS program, the gymnasium was opened to the Opals this week so they could prepare for the Asia Cup, a tournament which doubles as a qualifying event for next year’s Paris Olympic Games.

“They’re absolutely fantastic,” said Goriss of the NSWIS facilities. “The team loves it, [from a S&C perspective] we have everything we need. Being just down the road from our hotel as well as our practice games facilities, it’s unbelievable.

“[The gym] is fully stacked, and everything we need.”

As a state-of-the-art gymnasium which caters for NSWIS’s 16 different sporting programs ranging from swimming to cycling to water polo to athletics to hockey and sailing, Goriss said the equipment was perfect for the basketballers to prepare properly.

“It’s multifunctional equipment,” he enthused. “Everything we’ve used in the gym is versatile, it’s durable and it is very, very suitable for tall athletes.”

Opals coach Shannon Seebohm said of the tournament, in which Australia is pitted in Group B against Japan, Chinese Taipei, and the Philippines, that the pre-tournament camp was ‘critical.’

“It’s a chance to make sure we sharpen up all the things we need to,” she said. “Put all the offensive and defensive schemes in that we’re going to use for the tournament and also start to get a bit of a feel as well for the group, who’s going to play well with who, who we need to be selecting and all those types of things.”

Photograph courtesy of Basketball Australia