I’ve written articles on a lot of subjects and dozens of people. This was a vision of mine for Vancouverbasketball.ca for sometime now. After a long wait and good timing, the first installment of “A Day in the Life…” is here! Our first candidate is a good friend to the Vancouverbasketball.ca family! I’ve known and played with and against this man on the hardwood for nearly a decade! Good battles, good competition, all in all a great experience all around.
Courtesy of KLST Productions YouTube Channel
Doug Plumb is going to take you through his second season in the 1st Division Pro League in Hungary. I will let him walk you through his season as it unfolds. My vision is for other young athletes to realize that it is not NBA or bust! You can still make a good living playing in pro leagues across the globe. These leagues are filled with different people from all walks of life that have at least one thing in common…The Love for Basketball!
Without further introduction….Doug Plumb’s first entry in “A Day in the Life….”
What’s up everyone?!
The Vancouver basketball community is a very small and tight knit group so most of you who will be reading this will know me but for those of you who do not know me Ill give you a quick rundown. I’m born and raised just down the road in the swamp aka Pitt Meadows. I’ve been playing hoops since I was about 8 years old; starting out at legendary Pitt Meadows coach Rich Goulet’s basketball camps and up through high school there at Pitt until grade 10 when I moved south and ‘took my talents to south..’ Minnesota to finish off my preps hoops. I played my college ball at Minnesota State (NCAA D2) and finished out my eligibility back home here on the beautiful point grey campus at UBC.
I currently am playing overseas in a town of about 55 thousand in a town called Medias. Medias is located right in the heart of Romania and Transylvania….yes thats a real place. This is my second year playing professionally as last season I played in the Hungarian first division. We thought it would be cool to take you along the journey here and give you an inside look at what it looks like as an athlete abroad who has walked and played in the same gyms that most of you are currently playing in back home in Vancouver.
As it sits right now we are right in the middle of preseason. I have been here for just over a month now and up until about a week ago training consisted mostly of running sprints until you feel like puking and some on court skill type workouts. Our roster was just finalized last week with the last foreigners from Serbia and Belarus finishing out their summer commitments to their national team programs. Believe me when I tell you they were a sight for sore eyes because until that point we hadn’t done much real basketball..only the aforementioned dry heaving twice daily at the track and in the gym.
Different leagues have different rules pertaining to how many foreign players each team can have. This league allows a maximum of 6 of us to be suited up for each game. We have players from Serbia, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania and of course moi holding it down for the true north strong and free.
Preseason is a pretty rigorous time of the year as coaches are trying to fit so much into such a short period of time to get the team ready for league which starts at the end of september. Life has been pretty routine…and doubly exhausting. A typical non-game day looks something like this: Wake up, wonder how I am going to practice, give self pep talk while choking down putrid instant coffee, go to practice, get extra shots up after, come home – ice and stretch, eat lunch at our restaurant, take a 2 hour mini-coma, wake up and go get more coffee, head to night practice, practice for 2 hours, get extra shots up after, go for dinner, come home, ice bath…enter full coma until next morning. Repeat.
All jokes aside…I’m not joking.
It is what we love to do so it is all worth it but whether you are playing on TV or in Transylvanian eastern Europe you cannot cheat the grind, you get what you put in..and thats what is demanded of us everyday here.
We are actually on the bus heading home from our 4th preseason game and its about 1 a.m. as I write this. I put together a little video to show you a typical game day behind the scenes.
Courtesy of dplumb10 YouTube Channel
Preseason lasts another two weeks here before we get into the real season. I can’t wait, I’m finally healthy this year and I put a lot of work into making sure my body was ready to go this year. Last year I was injured most of the year and being a rookie I didn’t know how to act or how to handle the injury so I played through an achilles injury that essentially limited my game to the level of my basketball-handicapped father. I feel like not a lot of people know me here and I will surprise a lot of people. What I have learned is that playing hard is a skill in itself and after the frustrating year I had last year…these dudes are gunna have to hold me back cuz I’m getting after it this year.
Until next time, thanks for reading and remember to #FearTheMamba
Much love,
DP
P.S. this is another little video just to show you some of the sights and sounds from the first month here on and off the court.
SOURCE: VANCOUVER BASKETBALL
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