Sidelines on COTW
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The struggle of finding streetball courts in Wales
Searching for the Shadows
Another cold, wet, UK winter day, and another 4 1/2 hours left in work! It's lunch time again, and time to get going on my new favourite obsession. I'm quite new to Courts Of The World, and I guess so far Im the only person in Wales with a profile on here, although, noticing there are only 9 of us from the UK on this site in total! Still, bet I'm the only one with a COTW vest (cheers Stephan and Claas).
So, I work in an office, not the best job in the world, but it pays the bills, and I do get some internet access, if only a very limited amount, but the powers that be haven't twigged COTW, so other than the odd browse on Wikipedia, I spend most of my lunchtime reading the articles, and [... read more]
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DaMove
Italian Freestyle Crew on the Rise
Right now, the biggest thing in italian freestyle basketball has to be DaMove, a crew that has received rave reviews and has performed more than 500 shows all over Europe since its formation in 2000.
However, they look back on humble beginnings: The Crew was founded by Lorenzo"Aig $cream" Pinciroli and Fabio "K-lean" Mastromatteo when they met at the national finals of the Adidas Streetball Challenge. From that time on, they started to travel all over Italy, meeting other high-flying Dunkers and Streetballers. Addicted to the game, they looked everywhere for tournaments, playgrounds and dunk contests, always trying to find the next challenge or battle. As they got more exposure and [... read more]
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...and the winner is - UKRAINE ! ! !
Moscow Open 3on3
For three years now Moscow hosts one of the most representative international streetball tournaments. On the 4th, 5th and 6th of September 17 teams from all over the world battled for the champion title and the main prize of 10K $. Europe, Asia and America all sent some of their best players.
Competitors came from Germany, Italy, China, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Croatia, Estonia, USA and Russia. Teams like the S.K.Y Streetball Syndicate took part and when you hear that S.K.Y with its players Spyda, Chris Crump and Erick Price got kicked out by Estonia in the first play-off round, you know how strong the [... read more]
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We're giving away 23 sleeveless shirts among new members
23 Tees 4 Free!
courtsoftheworld.com is entering its fourth month online and even though that in itself is no reason for celebrating, we decided to do it anyway. We gathered all our savings and robbed an old woman of hers so that we could offer you this: Everyone that becomes a member from now on until the 23rd of October and adds at least one new court will automatically participate in the drawing for one of our official courtsoftheworld.com sleeveless shirts.
We're giving away 23 shirts in total, which are available in black or white and feature high quality prints on front and back. We will contact the lucky few about their color preferences and shirt sizes. So sign up if you‘re new or tell [... read more]
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Damn that cheap server!
Courtsoftheworld was on TrueHoop
On monday, we were included in Henry Abbott's daily bullets on TrueHoop, which led to way more traffic on courtsoftheworld than we usually experience. More people registered, more people added courts. We also got tons of advice on what still needs to be done better, hints what might be missing. And we got a lot of encouragement and positive feedback.The two most important lessons we took away from this?1) There is a real need for what we do. That's why we're going to go back to the lab, lock ourselves in and work on all your suggestions to get it right.2) It's the ballers putting their homecourts on the map and displaying their skills on video who make this site colorful and informative [... read more]
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Streetball in Croatia
The Awakening of a New Lipik
Basketball is a national sport in Croatia, which gave birth to numerous NBA players like Dražen Petrović, Toni Kukoč, Krešimir Ćosić, Gordan Giriček, Žan Tabak and many others. While most of these players derive from the famous clubs in Zagreb and Split, the heart of the country’s streetball scene lies in the rather small city of Lipik. This is even more surprising if you take into consideration that the city’s infrastructure was burned down and destroyed in the Yugoslav wars in 1991. The tournament is organized by a local youth association, a generation from whom the war has taken a major part of their childhood.The annual streetball tournament at Lipik Orphanage [... read more]
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Hoops Care is Making a Difference Through Basketball
Uplifting Ghana's Youth
There are good reasons why we don‘t hear a lot about Basketball in Africa. First off, in many African countries, people have to deal with very serious issues such as poverty and HIV. And you can make the case that showing kids how to throw a ball into a hoop is not really something that has to be tackled with the same kind of urgency.
Secondly, accessibility to media we use everyday, i.e. the internet, is much more scarce (Insert „hot spot“-joke here). That‘s probably a big reason why a lot of things going on in Africa are not „visible“ to the rest of the world.
But we have started courtsoftheworld.com four weeks ago to show what‘s happening on [... read more]
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Very Important Tournament
Romanias VIT - The Sportarena Streetball Championships
Some streetball tournaments are known worldwide - the EBC in NYC or Quai54 in Paris just to name two... - others are not and still they are most important to a regional scene. The Sportarena Streetball Championships is such a series of tournaments that without a single doubt became a social phenomenon on the top basketball court of Romania - Politehnica!
This streetball tournament is the most important 3on3 and 5on5 streetball tournament series in Romania having hosted almost 1.000 teams (4.000 players) in 2008. 2009 is the 5th consecutive year the series takes place and the aim to make things even more spectacular than in 2009 is set high. Making it even more spectacular also means [... read more]
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The bad teacher's words
Exploring the History of Fake Rap. Part 2: Miseducation
The first video in our second part of this series is an anti-piracy video from the early 90s. A crazy crackhead looking rapper called MC Double Def DP (The Disk Protector), state of the art computer effects, a deep message from actual game developers combined to 10 minutes of memories and shames. Jeeeze….. get the bit-torrent instead! “Welcome to the end of the computer age.”
Next is a video from the 80’s featuring Mr. T – well known as Clubber Lang in Rocky III and B.A. Baracus in The A-Team. He’s a man with big words, and thus he sums it up right in Mr. T-glish: “When you put down one mother, you’re putting down [... read more]
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The Kitchen Diaries
Beardyman - Cooking it up!
Beardyman also known as Darren Foreman is one of the UK legends when it comes down to beatboxing. Why?!?
3.5 million viewers (and still counting) checked out his "Kitchen Diaries" on YouTube...
...and this is for a good reason! See for yourself and check out his dope sketch cooking up snares, bass drums and claps... and ah, yes... some household white noise from his TV to a tight beat.
[... read more]
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Talentino23
Reppin' the Canaries
If you haven't heard of the Canary Islands, there's a good chance you're not the only one. But since COTW is all about representing world streetball, it´s about time to change that and put the Canaries on your map. Although you may never have heard of any of them, there are quite a few ballers on the small islands located west of the North Africa coastline. One of them is Tino del Toro Velasco who earned his nickname "Talentino" due to his blacktop skills. He represents his home island Gran Canaria and StreetFlavour Crew.
Only 5'6" (1.73cm) and 149 lbs. (70 kg), Talentino is foremost a spectacular scorer who is quick, athletic and can throw it down, despite his [... read more]
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Soul in the Hole
The brooklyn boogie - these guys are not to be played with!
A couple of days ago I listed the “Raymond Bush Playground“ which is located in Brooklyn and was formerly known as Putnam Playground. Raymond Bush Playground today honors the memory of Raymond Bush (1924-2002), a local community activist and basketball coach.
Something that directly came to my mind was the classic documentary "Soul in the Hole". Large parts of this legendary movie (directed by Danielle Gardner and starring Ed “Booger” Smith) were shot at Raymond Bush Playground. The last time I watched it was a real loooooong time ago, when people used to insert black plastic bricks a.k.a. VHS-cassettes into a video-recorder to watch movies. But since this is [... read more]
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The Dunk Machine
Melbourne's Area 51
Chand aka Area 51 stands small at 5’8” but flies hign with a 51 inch vertical disrespecting the limitations the human anatomy and earth gravity impose upon mankind.
Physical boundaries seemingly do not go for Area 51 who really has some serious-ups. Check out the video below to see what is going down in Australia dunkwise.
There is certainly some sick talent in Australia emerging from playgrounds all over the country. It is for a good reason that Australian basketball is on the upside again. If you want to find out more about streetball in Australia stay tuned - there is more to [... read more]
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Mr. Shoemaker, stick to your last!
Exploring the History of Fake Rap. Part 1: Promotional Abuse.
The first one in our hall of shame is a promotional video of the Southern Food Brokerage. Obviously, including bad rapping helped getting products into grocery stores back in the 80’s. I wish I could describe how tremendously awful this video is. They, however, cut to the chase in one line: “We’re so bad, we know we’re good”. I have to state that Charlie Carson is one badass gangsta rapper!
Next one is a video of Southwest Airlines, which was obviously some sort of internal promotional video. It’s a whole nine minutes full of mullets, big shoulder pads, bad rapping and an endless cast of pilots, ground crew, skypads and [... read more]
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Along the Sidelines
What beats a Game of Pick-Up Basketball? A lot of Things.
We are a streetball website. But that doesn't mean we don't also enjoy other stuff. And sometimes, it's the things that happen next to the court that are much more interesting than a game that's going on. And sometimes it's things that have nothing to do with basketball at all.
On the Sidelines, we're going to draw your attention to those things: Background stories on people that have made a living with streetball. Music that should be coming through your headphones on the way to the court. Sneakers that'll make your eyes hurt (That's a good thing!).
This is also the place where we will keep you up-to-date on new features at COTW, so make sure to check back often!
[... read more]
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A True Story
How the Chinese Invented COTW
OK, they didn't exactly invent it. But they somehow initiated this whole thing:
Back in the summer of 2006, my brother (known around here as CG) found himself somewhere in Shanghai, looking for a court where he could check out the local competition. Being abroad – out of your comfort zone and in a place where people talk in riddles – makes things harder than you might imagine. The Chinese, overly polite by nature, nod understandingly even if they have absolutely no clue what the hell you‘re talking about. Any question will be answered with a „Yes“, which is reassuring in a way, but doesn‘t get you an inch closer to a basketball court.
As you can [... read more]
