A good two weeks ago, Leon scratch was once again sitting in the stands of the Oberfrankenhalle. It was a Sunday afternoon, the Bayreuth basketball players were facing Tübingen in the second-class Pro A, and Schieber, center and German national player, was watching the game alongside Johannes Schmelzinger, a member of the club’s supervisory board.
When Schock now talks about the Bayreuth team he saw on the floor, he calls them: “the boys”. Coaches and players, the fans, it all seemed “like a family” to him, says Schieber. At the beginning the spectators were quite tense, after all, there is a lot at stake – but, and that left an impression on Schieber: the fans were there. And they stood behind their team until the final siren.
Whenkrater, 27, talks about his visit home, he is currently in Paris, over 800 kilometers away from Bayreuth. He has been playing there for a year and a half and is now at home there, but in conversation you can tell that he is aware of what is currently going on in Bayreuth, his hometown. Scratcher knows the results, he knows what’s going on in the club and what’s on the minds of the people who go to the Oberfrankenhalle every other weekend.
He recently joined Bayreuth as a partner. A step that suggests drawing parallels with Dennis Schröder, who led the German national team to the World Cup in 2023 and is the main shareholder in the Lions in his hometown of Braunschweig. However, the comparison is flawed simply because the structures in Bayreuth are different.
“Half the town used to rush to the hall on Saturdays. Bayreuth was in a state of emergency.”
When sole shareholder Carl Steiner left, 18 shareholders took his place. Since then, the number has increased to 25 in a year and a half. Nowkrater, a child of Bayreuth basketball, is also involved. “Before,” he says, “half the town ran to the hall on Saturdays. Bayreuth was in a state of emergency. I was already looking forward to going to the hall in the evening. Most of the time I played myself first, changed at home – and then of course I went to the hall.”
They are childhood memories of a man who has now traveled widely. Scratcher played in the Bayreuth youth team until he was 14, later making a name for himself in the Bundesliga. He threw his baskets for Würzburg, briefly in Bamberg, then for Frankfurt and Bonn before moving to Paris in 2023 after the Champions League victory with Bonn.
The fact that he is now joining Bayreuth as a partner should also send a signal to the outside world. Internally, for the club, it is another step in the reconstruction. Scratcher does not want to reveal the extent to which he is involved – after all, it is the soft factors that motivated him to get involved in Bayreuth.
Since he started playing in France, he has been home two or three times a year. The tranquility of Bayreuth is a welcome contrast to the excitement of the cosmopolitan city of Paris. Scratcher can come down here after a long season, he’s rooted here. Because things are quite hectic in Paris, it feels like a vacation when he comes to Bayreuth. The only difference is that there are no palm trees or beaches here and scratch knows the vacation spot very well. Everything is familiar, everything is warm – even in these days, which are quite cold not only in terms of temperatures, but also in a metaphorical sense.
“These are difficult times,” says Schieber, “but it is also a good time to show that Bayreuth basketball is alive.” The fact that he has to emphasize this at all also means, conversely, that some may not consider him dead yet, but certainly for a patient who needs help. And that’s basically how it is. Bayreuth has lost seven of the first ten games of the season and is in 15th place, followed only by the Nuremberg Falcons, the Giants Düsseldorf and the second team of the Bundesliga club Vechta. Despite the recent win against fourth-placed Kirchheim, the situation is tense.
The situation isn’t exactly rosy, says Schieber and then builds a link to the good times when Bayreuth still played in the Bundesliga. The club missed out on improving the infrastructure. A mistake that now falls on his hands. If it weren’t for the failures at the time, Schieber is certain that Bayreuth wouldn’t have fallen so far in the first place. But now the club, which was still in the playoffs in 2018, finds itself in the Pro A relegation battle. Scratcher believes: The infrastructure needs to improve, young people need to be given more attention, and the city needs to provide more support.
It is clear to him that this is a long journey that requires patience and forbearance. Scratcher has no illusions. “The curve won’t go up steeply,” he says, “it’s a young team and the financial leeway isn’t as big as it used to be.” The national player knows that Bayreuth is struggling right now, but he, Leon Scratch, has decided to fight this fight.
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