Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra is enjoying his time coaching Team USA in the Philippines for the 2023 FIBA World Cup. He will serve as an assistant coach to Team USA head coach Steve Kerr.
Spoelstra is Filipino American. His mother Elisa is from San Pablo, a city in the Filipino province of Laguna.
According to The Athletic, the 52-year-old visited the country when he was three.
“Growing up, my goal initially was to play in the PBA,” Spoelstra told reporters in Taguig on Wednesday, according to The Manila Times. “That was always a dream of mine. My family would send me tapes of PBA games, and I just saw that and how crazy the crowds were.”
He visited Manila specifically for four summers from 2008 to 2012 to help run basketball camps for children, The Athletic reports. On Wednesday, after the team arrived, he helped host a camp for high school students at the gym connected to the team hotel.
“This is a country of extremes,” Spoelstra told The Athletic after the camp on Wednesday. “You’re here (at the team hotel in downtown Manila), and it feels like you’re in Brickell (an upscale neighborhood in downtown Miami with a similar tropical climate), and then you go 10 minutes out of here, there’s extreme poverty.”
“You marvel sometimes how Filipinos can have such an amazing spirit. When we would look and say, wow, ‘You are without,’ they think they have everything. And that’s something that I’ve always wanted people to come on a trip with me to be able to see.”
Spoelstra is also set to speak more about how it feels to be coaching in his mother’s home country in an interview with Rappler. The interview premieres tonight at 7:00 p.m.
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