Basketball | “Would you take your child to a dentist with timpur training” – Henrik Dettmann sums up the big problem of Finnish junior coaching

Prague

Coach by Henrik Dettmann the critics are bound to be badly disappointed. Dettmann is not going anywhere from basketball or the Basketball Association.

Even the interview can’t be a farewell when Dettmann isn’t stepping aside. He says that he would not agree to a farewell interview.

Dettmann promises to attack the phone lines at six o’clock in the morning if the ex-coach writes about him. Not written.

The former head coach is now a coach or, more correctly, the sports director of the Basketball Association. The coach never disappears from the coach.

Last fall, in November, Dettmann announced his decision. He moved aside from the position of head coach and made room Lassi Tuovi. However, Dettmann stayed, even though he disappeared from sharing comments after the matches.

“When I’ve never been at work, but with basketball, where should I go from here,” says Dettmann, 64, and confirms that his contract is for life as a model.

Dettmann has also done work. He sat in Postipanki’s office in the early years of his coaching career, but left that job.

In Prague, he says he would have made much more money by staying in the bank. That’s what he knows about many of his former colleagues.

In front of the team’s hotel, Dettmann takes two steps forward when a Czech boy aged around 13-14 Adam Horsky ask for an autograph.

After five steps Serbian basketball agent Misko Raznatović wants to exchange a few words with Dettmann.

In a cafe, three Serbian basketball influencers demand to have a group photo.

This would not happen to any Finnish banker on the corners of Prague’s old town. Hardly even in Helsinki.

Dettmann coached the national basketball team twice. First in the years 1992–97 and again in 2004–2022.

Followers of basketball of the younger generation and why not a little older have always lived in Dettmann’s time.

Some started to get bored when the same coach defined the guidelines of basketball in Finland year after year. The other side saw behind the development curtain.

Before the Dettmann era, Finland managed to play 11 times in the EC tournament and twice in the Olympics, in 1952 and 1964.

No less than 18 years had passed since the previous EC tournament before the team coached by Dettmann made it to the 1995 Games.

At the beginning of his last head coaching season in 2006, Dettmann noticed that there were 23 people working in the Basketball Association. Of all these, he was the only coach.

“I said, oh, it’s come a long way from sports.”

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“Everything starts with the players. At the top, you need skilled players who work seamlessly together. Competent coaching is the most important support measure for this.”

Now Dettmann calculates that there are about ten coaches on the union’s payroll and more than 30 in total, but two-thirds of them work on the oto principle.

Dettmann says that ultimately it’s all about the result. In elite sports, you have to forge results if you are going to keep up the pace of success.

“No one buys the story of a losing team.”

“It had to be made clear that we have to manage. It is born through sports. If you get results, you have credibility.”

The first thing about the coaching change was training. Youth coaches had to be trained and thereby raise the level of coaching.

“Everything starts with the players. At the top, you need skilled players who work seamlessly together. Competent coaching is the most important support measure for this.”

Dettmann likes similes. Let’s use one of them again when he talks about starting a basketball hobby for young people.

“Would you take your child to a dentist with dental hygienist training.”

Training quality lifting makes the decision to remain a basketball fan easier. When going to practice for the first time, no child knows what will be done and what will happen there.

In good hands and skilled instruction, you will stay in the sport and come again.

“We have one superior sport – ice hockey,” says Dettmann and highlights the network of more than 200 ice rinks and extensive coaching expertise.

“It’s pointless for others to complain. Others can copy their systems and adapt them to their own sport.”

Sen Dettmann adds that no other sport has a money machine like the hockey World Cup tournament, which generates a pot of millions of euros for the sport through home tournaments. That’s what happened last spring at the World Championships in Tampere and it seems to happen again next spring.

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“I don’t know if I have received criticism. There is no movement without feeling. However, I am not a monopoly, but everything is done together.”

Since 1995, Finland has played six times in the European Championship and once at the World Cup level as a wild card.

Getting to the World Cup tournament became a funny farce from an outsider’s eyes. The team had to buy their place in the tournament like a formula driver would go to a team with money.

We are starting to approach Dettmann’s mental area. He emphasizes that Finland did not just buy a place at the World Cup, but invested in the future for a decade. And Dettmann wants to add that Finland met the sporting requirements.

The international basketball association Fiba suffered from financial difficulties and invented the wild card system. Finland paid 800,000 euros for its place, even though it would have reached the Games by playing if the old qualifying methods had been in effect.

In the qualifiers, Finland was the first European to miss out.

“It was quite embarrassing to finance Fiba.”

So much was the immediate importance of the World Cup place that, according to Dettmann, one zero was added to the sponsorship income of the Basketball Association and the size of the first number increased.

“Sponsorship income increased 25-fold.”

Dettmann’s player generations have changed, but Finland’s level in European basketball has remained. Next year’s WC spot came by playing, and long before the qualifiers were decided.

Access to next year’s joint tournament between Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines was confirmed late last Sunday, when Finland first beat Estonia and then Sweden defeated Israel.

“The finest achievement of Henrik Dettmann’s coaching career. Congratulations”, hockey influencer Alpo Suhonen sent a message to Dettmann the next morning.

Dettmann is grateful for the message and agrees, although as a single tournament Germany’s World Cup bronze also rises very high. Dettmann coached Germany at the 2002 World Cup tournament in Indianapolis.

Long periods in the same coaching environment cause envy, criticism and criticism. Dettmann hasn’t escaped criticism either.

“I don’t know if I have received criticism. There is no movement without feeling. However, I am not a monopoly, but everything is done together.”

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“I still think that there would have been quite a lot to give.”

Yes, Dettmann has had his share, but he often throws back a sharp receipt if he considers the criticism worth it.

In addition, he says that he strives to take a stand on those things that he can influence. And he gives advice, but he doesn’t want to push them.

So far, there have been enough listeners.

Dettmann was about to change his field as well, when he set out to pursue the vacant position of the Olympic Committee’s top sports director last spring.

“I applied for it at the beginning. I thought that I had received so much from Finnish sports that I wanted to offer my expertise to the use of Finnish sports.”

Now Dettmann says that he gave up the idea at the head of OK, because the application process lost credibility and he didn’t want to get involved in that mess.

“I still think that there would have been quite a lot to give.”