Darko Rajaković, the head coach of the Toronto Raptors basketball team, is only the second foreign national, after our Igor Kokoškov, to get an opportunity to be the head coach of an NBA team.
Born in Čačak, in his exclusive interview with Kurir, Darko Rajaković talks about the changes that basketball has gone through since he started his coaching career on 2 August 1996 in Borča, the influence of our coaches, and the opportunity he got in the US.
In all your conversations about basketball, you emphasize that the key thing is treatment. Not only of players and coaches, but also of all the team members and the people who make up a club. Could you compare the time from the start of your career with the treatment and relations that are prevalent today?
“Everything has changed, from the internet and social media, the speed of information flow, to the upbringing of children… The famous coach Rick Pitino once said that in principle, players haven’t changed, but the adults did and the way we treat them. It all comes from the family – if the family is strong and there’s respect for the true values, it’s much easier to build relationships and help them understand that the team should always come first, not the individual. However, society is increasingly focused on everyone minding their own interest only. All this makes working with players hard, and it makes for a very complex and great question that we could talk, or even write a book, about. In Europe, the team is still the priority, but in the US the competition system and various other things are such that they reward individual successes. A high school player, if he scores a lot of points, will be on the radar of a college scout. It won’t be because the team has won but because he has good scores, leading him to the NBA. Many players reach the highest level without ever winning anything in their lives. These guys need to be educated so that they understand that the team is more important than the individual. The famous UCLA college coach John Wooden had a basketball player who had never made it in the NBA but, 20 years after leaving the sport, he admitted that he had become a successful Hollywood producer by applying some of the lessons he’d learned from his college coach. Professional athletes mostly end their careers in their thirties. These are very young people who wonder – what next? In the US, they do have a degree and can do some sort of work, whereas in Europe education and doing sports cannot be matched. Ultimately, everyone talks about those who have succeeded, but what about the thousands of those who did not manage to earn money to make ends meet? There should be a vision, care should be taken of what happens to these people – whether they stay in the sport, become referee coaches, club managers, basketball supporters…”
You have worked in FC Borac, in Red Star, and then in Spain, finally coming to the US. How did your adaptation and separation from home go?
“It’s still going on – it won’t end until I retire. The constant struggle continues, the learning, the adapting… Many things have happened, and there have been a lot of challenges, but you try to do everything right, hoping that someone will recognize it. A huge number of coaches, who are great people and professionals, have never got this chance. I’m absolutely aware that none of this would have come to pass if it hadn’t been for Maljković, Pešić, Ivković, Željko Obradović, Ranko Žeravica and Professor Aleksandar Nikolić, who raised Serbian basketball to an incredible level, so now, with a population of six million, we have two teams in the EuroLeague… Recognizing the success of the Serbian basketball and coaches has certainly helped both Igor Kokoškov and me a great deal to get an opportunity and be the only two foreign nationals holding the posts of head coaches in the NBA. Had I been born in Romania, these things would certainly not have happened, no matter if I did the same things and had the same level of knowledge. I’ve learnt from our coaches that no matter whether I’m coaching the Red Star junior team or being the head coach of Toronto, whether there are two or 20,000 supporters at a game, that the approach is always the same – top focus on the rectangle, and when the ball is thrown high up, the only thing that’s important is that I help my team be better and do more. When I go out onto the court, our main goal is to win,“ Rajaković said.
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