The Rise of China’s Basketball Assisted by SGV Coaches

(Left to Right) Coach Danny Piepoli, Yao Ming, Coach Richard Marquis, and Coach Charles Carter. – Courtesy photo / Play Smarter Basketball

Yao Ming’s New NYBO China Youth Basketball Development Program

Yao Ming and his closest basketball associate, Mr. Lu Hao, are on the move to continue improving China’s status in the world of competitive basketball. Ming has already brought China’s interest and recognition in basketball to an unbelievable level through his dominance in China’s Olympic participations and, of course, through his other relationship with the NBA and the Houston Rockets. Currently, China’s interest in basketball has been greatly elevated through the passion of both Ming and Hao, a long-time business associate and friend. Currently, there is a greater effort to increase China’s basketball development to an even higher status.

Yao Ming has recently become the person in charge of his country’s development as China’s newest basketball Chairman and the Director of Basketball Operations. One of his goals is to use this opportunity to develop China’s overall youth basketball skill that will turn China into a greater, stronger future challenger, so China can compete at a much higher, global level.

One of San Gabriel Valley’s youth basketball development training programs, The Play Smarter Basketball Classes (PSB), have been traveling to different parts of Asia, conducting their annual training camps for the past fifteen summers. This summer, Coach Marquis, founder of PSB and two of his coaching staff have just returned from several of their Asian summer camps that were located in six different areas throughout Mainland China. Their last camp was for Yao Ming and Lu Hao’s newly formed National Youth Basketball Open (NYBO), a youth training and competition development program. Coach Marquis and his staff were asked by Ming and Hao to be involved by sharing their PSB development philosophy to their programs 100-plus coaches.

The NYBO has been designed to somewhat mimic America’s oldest, largest and most successful, development youth program, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). Ming and Hao’s basketball staff in China have met with the National AAU staff in Florida and have already begun to implement similar methods in their NYBO program. They have designed this new program to help further develop China’s youth and lower level basketball teams throughout China and have achieved great success during the launch of their first NYBO 2017/2018 summer completions.

Coach Marquis and his local PSB classes have been asked to continue to work with China’s new, outstanding development program, and possibly even bring some of their PSB teams and students to the NYBO second 2019 summer camp.

Coach Marquis, a longtime friend of Yao Ming and Lu Hao, believes that these two very dedicated and experienced basketball minds will bring a greater, all-round improvement to Chinese’s youth basketball development in the very near future, causing swifter improvement in the overall basketball development and skill levels throughout China.