How Jamaal Phatty can make difference in new German program
Jamaal Phatty arrived this summer under the radar at EPG Baskets Koblenz, and the 2005-born talent could help the third division club become Germany’s next youth basket hotbed.
Taking The Charge Long Read is a chance to look deeper into stories about players or clubs and give readers more insight than just a brief article. This edition investigates what the signing of top German talent Jamaal Phatty could mean to EPG Baskets Koblenz.
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As far as under-the-radar signings go, it’s kind of hard to beat a German third division ProB club adding a new player to their roster who really might not even be a major contributor.
But then again, the September 18, 2021 announcement of EPG Baskets Koblenz bringing in 16-year-old Jamaal Phatty is the kind of news that at least can hint at major shockwaves on the German youth landscape.
Sure, sure … this story needs a lot of background - especially for those who are less aware of the youth scene in Germany. But by the time the final words of this article are read, you just might believe that EPG Baskets Koblenz could soon be an emerging influence - let’s not say powerhouse just yet.
So, what’s the news all about and why does some player named Jamaal Phatty who I have never heard of going to a club I have never heard of warrant reading on? Please allow the case to be made.
First off to Jamaal Phatty. While the name may have come across your computer screen if you are into youth basketball, the name Bonga definitely rings a bell. Think Isaac Bonga, then his younger brother Joshua Bonga. And then consider the fellow 2005-born Phatty teaming up with the younger Bonga brother to do major damage in Germany together, winning the country’s U14 national title together in 2019.
Many consider Phatty - an athletic wing with good size and all-around skill-set - a better prospect than Joshua Bonga, who this season is playing in Lithuania for powerhouse Zalgiris Kaunas. Phatty’s name really started making the rounds outside of Germany in 2019 after his showing for Germany at the North Sea Cup.
Phatty, a native of Kassel who also lived in Frankfurt, had spent two years with Skyliners before spending last season in the United States with Mount Zion Christian Academy in North Carolina as well as the Indiana-based talent factory La Lumiere. A youngster going to America to play high school basketball might not seem out of the ordinary but consider Phatty’s whole picture. He was in the United States without his family during a worldwide pandemic in a time when the country was at major odds both politically and culturally on how to deal with Covid-19 and everything around it. There was also uncertainty about what games will be played or not due to restrictions or quarantine requirements. Oh, and he only turned 16 in March 2021.
Fast forward to this past summer. Phatty was back in Germany and had been invited to the training camp for the German U16 national team that would be playing at the FIBA U16 European Challengers in Sofia, Bulgaria with the hopes of perhaps qualifying for the FIBA U17 Basketball World Cup 2022 - which would be Germany’s second appearance in the global event following 2010 when they hosted the first edition of the competition.
Being back on home soil and seeing his friends, Phatty apparently started thinking about staying in Germany for the 2021-22 season. That’s where Mario Dugandzic enters the picture.
Oh man, another name that means nothing. Sorry, but it’s his connection to names you may already know that adds the intrigue to the story. Dugandzic has been a youth coach for a number of years in Germany, going through stints at Nürnberg, Karlsruhe, Bremerhaven and Ehingen/Urspring before really leaving his mark in the Brose Bamberg youth system - as well as with the German youth national teams.
Dugandzic served as head coach for Bamberg’s farm team Baunach Young and helped the team remain in the ProA second division in 2018 and also guided Bamberg’s U19 team to second place in the NBBL in 2019. In addition Baunach reached the ProB playoffs in 2020 and had home court advantage with Dugandzic as head coach. And he served as assistant coach for Germany on the team that took the bronze medal at the FIBA U20 European Championship 2019 in Israel.
Among the players who developed under his tutelage are Estonians Kristian Kullamae and Henri Drell, Australian Will McDowell-White, Jason George, the twins Brandon and Nicholas Tischler, Kay Bruhnke, Nelson Weidemann, Matthew Meredith, Haris Hujic, Edy Edigin, Felix Edwardsson of Sweden, Mateo Seric, Niklas Würzner, Tibor Taras and Elias Baggette.
After last season, Dugandzic was at a cross-roads: one option was to try to take a step up to the pro level as an assistant and work towards becoming a head coach in German pro basketball. That is not necessarily the most promising move, considering there are just two German head coaches in the German BBL league - Denis Wucherer of s.Oliver Würzburg and HAKRO Merlins Crailsheim’s Sebastian Gleim (compare that to four Spanish coaches in the league).
The alternative for Dugandzic would be to find a project with a youth dynamic to it and build up a new program there.
Enter Koblenz. The city of some 115,000 people hasn’t seen a club in Germany’s top flight since 1976 with ADB Koblenz. SC REI Koblenz played in the Bundesliga from 1969 to 1971 and ADB Koblenz from 1973 to 1976. And BG Post SV Koblenz was in the second division as late as 1998.
Okay, so it has been a while since Koblenz has been on the basketball map in Germany. Now I am not worried about never having heard about the city in terms of the sport.
In 2013, the club SG Luetzel-Post Koblenz - known in the league as EPG Baskts - announced the “Mission 15/20” to reach the fourth division 1st Regionalliga by 2015 and reach professional basketball by 2020. A businessman named Thomas Kleim took over the business and marketing aspects of the club and has been pushing for the professionalization of the team.
This past off-season, Dugandzic was asked if he wanted to take over as director of basketball operations and head coach. In addition to having a motivated financial backer, another attractive element to the offer was the CGM Arena, a 5,000-seat facility in Koblenz which is basically unused and the club wants to use for basketball this season. Ask cities like Cologne and Nürnberg what they would kill for to have a 5,000-seat arena and what it could do for a basketball program. And the Koblenz arena, which opened in 1992, is just waiting to be used - after having served until the end of September as a Covid-19 vaccination center. On top of that, Koblenz is also close enough to Frankfurt and Cologne to possibly draw young talent from those bigger cities. And there are three airports within an hour of Koblenz: Frankfurt, Frankfurt-Hahn and Cologne-Bonn.
“You have to take things into your own hands, and I have faith in myself and that I can develop a program and some guys. So, I said, let’s see and maybe some cool guys will want to come with me,” Dugandzic said.
He joined the club directly after he served once again as U20 German national team at the FIBA U20 European Challengers in Georgia. And the roster is more or less his own with just a couple of holdovers (Brian Butler and Lucas Mayer) from the team that reached the ProB playoffs last season after earning promotion from the fourth division 1st Regionalliga in 2019-20.
So, what does this season’s Koblenz team look like? Are there any interesting names?
For this season, Dugandzic was able to bring in Marvin Heckel, who played in the ProA second division last season with Bremerhaven but is a point guard who knew the coach from their time together at Baunach. The same goes for the 21-year-old, 7-0 center Leo Saffer. A nice addition to the team is also the 29-year-old forward Dominique Johnson, who has played five seasons in the BBL, including last season with NINERS Chemnitz and really gives the team a leadership figure on the court. And the 23-year-old center Moses Poelking is a former ALBA BERLIN farmhand who played the last two seasons for Bremerhaven in the second division.
Another interesting name on the team is Indrek Sunelik, whose arrival in Koblenz is thanks to Dugandzic’s past player development. The 21-year-old shooting guard is from Estonia and from the same 2000-born generation as Henri Drell. Sunelik had gone to high school in the United States and was at the junior college Northwest Florida State College in 2019-20. He returned home to Estonia for last season and played for BC Kalev/Cramo Tallinn, who won the Estonian league as well as the Latvian-Estonian competition last season.
“I had him on the list. I have known him for a while,” Dugandzic said about the 2.01 meter guard. “When I talked to Henri last summer he said he was in Tallinn working out with Indrek and I said what is Indrek doing, and he said he wanted to get out and was looking for something. I said let me talk to him, and Henri knows that I like to develop guys, and things came together.”
Dugandzic was pretty set with his team for 2021-22 at that point. Then came the news that Jamaal Phatty was thinking about staying in Germany - something for which the coach still had room in his roster.
“It was clear in the construction of the roster that I didn’t have a lot of room for projects and player development. We wanted to professionalize the team with guys who want to get to a high level. But I reached out to all of my network of scouts and agents that if a high level player came around I would be able to incorporate him into the team,” Dugandzic said. “In Baunach I had five or six of these prospects and it was always hard. They are all developing, as you can see and are all fighting for their minutes and will get them. But with a high profile guy I would definitely do that here.”
Dugandzic said he was with the U20 national team when a query came in if he could imagine taking a look at Phatty. He said the youngster’s agent and family were looking at a few programs, but Dugandzic thought he had a good chance.
“It was good that we didn’t have many prospects but that we would just have to incorporate the one while giving him everything he needs: school, individual training, a challenge at a high competition. We could offer all that. He liked that and his family did too,” Dugandzic said. “We had some tough competition with some of the other programs with bigger names. But I think it was an advantage that I had worked with the Tischlers, Baggette, Henri, McDowell-White and those guys. They knew I was not afraid to develop youngsters.”
Dugandzic said an added benefit was that Koblenz is not far from Frankfurt - about 125 kilometers away.
When asked about what his plan with Phatty is, Dugandzic said: “The plan is to bring him to this level and help him stablize himself as a person with school and obligations. He will also learn what it means to be a professional and everything that comes along with that. The plan is to bring him there step-by-step, not herky-jerky, but well thought-out and at the pace that he needs.”
Phatty will have the opportunity on the court to play at the ProB level and make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. Still, Dugandzic was quick to remind everyone that Phatty is still a long way from being a finished product.
“You can’t forget the highest level that he practiced at was JBBL (U16). So he didn’t play against men at all - not even in the (amateur) Oberliga. So he really has a lot ahead of him,” he said.
Phatty has been given his chances so far with his new team. He has played at least 16 minutes in all three games - three Koblenz victories - and he is averaging 6.3 points, 2.7 rebounds, 1.0 assists, 0.7 steals and 0.7 steals. Phatty impressed against FC Bayern Munich’s second team, collecting 11 points, 4 rebounds, 1 assist, 2 steals and 1block. While he has made 8-of-10 2-pointers, Phatty has missed all seven of his three-point attempts and just 3-of-7 free throws.
Phatty will be playing only with the club’s top team since Koblenz does not yet have teams in the U16 JBBL and U19 NBBL leagues - one of the next developments in the works for Dugandzic.
The coach said his first impressions of Phatty have been positive.
“He really seems normal, not arrogant at all. From the time I have worked with him and how I’ve gotten to know him, he’s not arrogant at all. He’s a good, normal, inquisitive kid who definitely wants to get better every day. That’s how he seems to me. And he enjoys it that the competition is higher than what he’s had in the past,” the coach said.
While knowing that the youngster still has a lot of work to do, Dugandzic did admit that having someone of the quality of Phatty in the program is a major benefit.
“We want players who might not know where they want to go to know that we can be an option. We want to develop players and give them a chance to play at a high level,” the coach said.
“If you play in the ProB with with a couple of prospects - it doesn’t have to be a whole team but a couple a core of prospects - then you have a possibility as an organization to make it attractive for people. People want to see talents, they want to watch these high level prospects and then see where they go and follow them.”
One of the next items on Dugandzic’s agenda is to start building up more relationships in the area as well as the infrastructure in Koblenz and surrounding area to find and develop top players from the region.
EPG Baskets Koblenz may not be high on the list of well-known programs that develop youth talent yet. But it might not be long before they are no longer under the radar.