Kenyan girls basketball team mourns death of young teammate in mall shooting

Kenyan girls basketball team mourns death of young teammate in mall shooting

Kenyan girls basketball team mourns death of young teammate in mall shooting

 

 

Kenyan girls basketball team mourns death of young teammate in mall shooting

 

 

Coffino comes out of Division I assistant jobs in the Northeast and the professional minor leagues from upstate New York to New Mexico to Texas. Basketball had bounced him from the States to Qatar to Kenya, where he had come this year to coach an African boys academy of raw, giant teenagers.
Soon after, Coffino was offered the chance to make some extra money coaching the girls at an international high school in Nairobi. Before these girls – before this tough, little point guard named Nuriana finally led them to a victory – never had the coach been moved to tears watching his players celebrate. They changed that for him, the way this journey to Africa has changed him forever.

needed a coach. The job paid $70 dollars a week.
"How could I turn that down?" Coffino said with a laugh. "I'm obviously spending more than I'm making here."
They gave Coffino a plane ticket, a house to live with his 13 players and a part-time cook six days a week. They practice and play games on outdoor courts, with bald basketballs and holes in the bottom of their shoes. Sometimes, the games get rained out. "Once, we couldn't play because they couldn't clear goats off the court," Coffino said.
Most of the players on his boys team fled the civil war in the south of Sudan, pushed through refugee camps and lived to tell him stories of lions picking off friends and family on late-night pilgrimages to freedom. He's taught his roster of long, wiry players the fundamentals of the game, and they've re-taught him the most rudimentary fundamentals of coaching.
"This reminds me of something John Wooden said: 'Never assume that your players understand what you're saying,' Coffino said. "They speak English, Swahili and sometimes things get lost in translation. I just assume they made a mistake, and I'll ask: 'Did you hear me? What did I just say?' I'd lose my cool. But this has taught me to be a lot more patient."
In the wake of the terrorist attacks targeted against non-Muslims, Coffino doesn't leave the house he shares with his players without an escort. "My guys here won't let me go anywhere – not even to the market – without three or four of them flanked at my side. Three 6-foot-10 Africans and a little Italian guy."