No shortcuts to success for Shanxi

Coach Cesar Ruperez Garcia insists Shanxi is still "a long way" off becoming a championship team despite the Flame's excellent start to the season.

The Spaniard, who won three WCBA titles with the club from 2012-2015 as assistant coach, has returned for a second stint with the Taiyuan-based team, and results so far have been impressive. Saturday's 94-84 triumph over Zhejiang kept Shanxi perfect after four WCBA games, along with Beijing and Guangdong.

However, in an interview with Xinhua last week, Garcia cautioned that rediscovering Shanxi's glory days will not be straightforward.

"We cannot take shortcuts. We need to go step by step," Garcia said on Wednesday.

"Everybody expects to win the championship, especially after the amazing seasons we had four years ago. But inside the team, we are not very focused on the championship. It's a long way to get there.

"We spent four amazing seasons here, and in three of them we won the WCBA championship. So we have great memories and have kept in touch almost every year with the club's owner. I spent a great time here. It's a great place to be a basketball coach."

Shanxi's current roster is a much younger bunch than the last title-winning squad four years ago.

"We have a young team, especially in the perimeter positions, where almost everybody is young. They need to gain experience and learn how to play tough games," Garcia said.

"We need to keep developing them. We hope that they will get better step by step and gain experience, which is very important if you want to be part of a winning team.

"First of all, we are trying to gel as a team and develop good chemistry between everyone. Then we need to be able to become a winning team, a team able to fight and compete in almost every game."

As for when that might happen, Garcia is reluctant to set a time frame.

"I don't know when we will be able to win a championship," he added. "But if we work hard, the team will get better and have a greater opportunity to get the championship."

Despite his youthful appearance, Garcia is a coaching veteran. He has coached for over two decades after his playing career ended prematurely due to a serious knee injury.

"Basketball is my life, from being a player to assistant coach and now head coach. For me it's not a job, it's my passion. Every time I go to the court to be an assistant coach or head coach, I enjoy myself."

Garcia's on a mission to inject that passion into his charges at Shanxi.

"Everything I'm trying to teach them, I try to do it with passion. If you don't play basketball with enough passion, then technical matters are irrelevant," he explained. "The most important thing is to be able and ready to fight. If you don't play with passion, then you cannot fight and win.

"It's a young team to try to improve. It's a long way from being a winning team. Step by step, I want to develop players and the playing style to become a winning team, then we will be one step closer to getting the championship.

"In the last couple of seasons, especially last season, the team was not a winning team. They won games, but they were not the kind of team that normally won."

After leaving Shanxi in 2015, Garcia was hired by Russia's Dynamo Kursk, which he led to a Euro Women's League crown in 2017.

Adding to his experience of working under Lucas Mondelo at Shanxi, he now feels well equipped to handle whatever the job throws at him.

"The challenge always comes with a lot of pressure. If you are not able to overcome the pressure, you cannot be a head coach," Garcia said.

Despite Garcia's reservations about his young team, Shanxi should not be overlooked as WCBA title contenders this season for one simple reason - 6-foot-8(203-centimeter) center Liz Cambage.

"She is a difference-maker," Garcia said of the Australian. "When she's on court, everybody goes around her. Defensively, it's easy with her in the paint because other teams cannot score easily.

"Offensively, it's all going on around her, because when you don't pay attention to her, she can score 40 points."

Garcia sees Cambage as the team's all-round leader, but is also urging his homegrown players to contribute more.

"I expect her to be a kind of leader of our team, and to try to engage everybody to play like a team. I don't want her to be the best scorer every time and everybody else just looks at her," Garcia said.

"The domestic players need to seize their opportunities. They have to know it's not just foreign players scoring or doing everything. Chinese players need to understand that they also can be important players in their teams."

Xinhua