By Jordan Delp

Jordan Delp is a men’s basketball player at Augustana. He is blogging about the team’s trip to China. For more posts about the Vikings’ journey, click here.

Today started with a 6:30 a.m. wake-up call to prepare for our last, busy day in Wuhan. After breakfast we got on the bus and drove about an hour for our game-day practice. This practice, however, was unlike any of our other game day practices, because we worked out in front of around 200 of China’s basketball coaches. Ranging from university and college level coaches up to the professional team leaders, the coaches were gathered for the 10th Annual Coaching Clinic of the CBA (China Basketball Association).

It was an awesome experience for all of us, and an opportunity that we realize not many players will probably have. For about an hour we went hard through a series of our drills, ranging from defensive slides, to rebounding and individual shooting drills.

After we were done going through our work, Coach Giovanine opened up the clinic for questions, and for around a half hour we walked through some of our offensive and defensive philosophies for the Chinese coaches. You could definitely see the type of motivation and determination that these men and women had for their profession. All of the coaches were very attentive, and it seemed like they were really trying to soak in all of what Coach G was attempting to teach them.

It is said that the coaching is not necessarily the best in China but, much like in many other industries, you can easily tell that they will get up to speed and begin to excel in this area as they excel in others because of their strong work ethic.

Once we were done with the clinic, we came back to the hotel to get cleaned up, eat lunch, and prepare for our game. Game time was 3:00 p.m. so there wasn’t a lot of time to relax in between practice and the game. After our warm-ups were finished, there was a long set of speeches by some of the more prominent people at the clinic, and we then exchanged gifts with our opponents. It is a traditional Chinese custom to exchange gifts with people you interact with, and it was cool to give them a more Western gift (a lanyard) and receive a Chinese craft in return.

The game went well for us, and we ended up beating the Hubbi Province All-Stars by a score of 68-45. We continue to really defend and rebound well, with seniors Oliver Rorer and Dan Rukavina really going after loose-ball rebounds. Juniors Alex Washington and Jeff Becker also played extremely well tonight, and helped lead us on both the offensive and defensive sides of the ball.

After the game, we experienced an interesting atmosphere. Many of the people in attendance asked to take photographs with some of the guys, they had us all sign a bunch of basketballs for them, and they even asked me to do an interview, through an interpreter, for the nightly sports news. It was pretty cool for all of us, but we know that in the end only one thing really matters: we left the Zhongnan University of Economics and Law gymnasium 2-0.