Basketball, World Cup: Banchi elected best coach

Perhaps there was no need for official recognition to arrive, because he had already comfortably entered among the winners of this Basketball World Cup. But now there is an award that puts it in black and white: Luca Banchi, coach of Latvia, has been named best coach of the 2023 Fiba World Cup. The Tuscan coach, 58 years old, native of Grosseto, led the Baltic national team, of which he took the lead in 2021, to a historic fifth place in the world championship, in what was the country’s first participation in the basketball world cup.

Super World Cup

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From the start, Banchi’s Latvia was the surprise of the World Cup, overcoming a first phase group in which it lost to Canada (then on the podium) but after having sensationally beaten and eliminated France who came from a world championship bronze and European silver and Olympic. In the second phase it then beat Scariolo’s Spain, reigning European gold medalist, and Brazil, silver medalist of the South American championships. In the quarterfinals he came within a few centimeters of beating Germany who later became world champions, finishing in the classification board, in which he beat the Azzurri and then overwhelmed Lithuania who had been able to beat the United States. All after losing star Kristaps Porzingis about ten days before the start of the event and the other leading light, captain Dairis Bertans, in the second match of the World Cup.

Path

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For Luca Banchi it is the consecration on the most prestigious stage of a career that started a long time ago and made up of a lot of apprenticeship, which began in Serie A from Basket Livorno, with which he had won three national youth titles, and passed through Trieste, Trapani and Jesi, before the called to Siena. With Mens Sana he won six championships as assistant coach and one as head coach, then he went to Milan where in his first year he won the tricolor which had been missing for 18 years under the Madonnina, the first of the five titles won by Olimpia in the Armani era, even touching the Euroleague Final Four. After leaving Milan he lived as a globetrotter with six benches in eight years between Turin, Bamberg, Aek Athens (with the Intercontinental Cup won), Lokomotiv Kuban, Pesaro, Strasbourg and in the meantime Latvia where he is now a national hero.