Nigerian American Basketball star Oderah Chidom has exited the Nigerian Basketball Federation over what she termed as a ‘lack of professionalism’ by the federation which she does not agree with.
“It saddens me to announce that I will no longer play for the Nigerian National Team. Of course, I will love to play for something bigger than myself that represents the country that means so much to me and my family but the current federation, I cannot continue to agree with the way they do business.”
Sharing her decision on her social media pages on Monday, she revealed that she will want to continue playing for the team but the unprofessionalism by the Nigeria Basketball Federation has made her quit.
Speaking to ESPN, Chidom stated that the open tryout for the women’s team in Chicago, Lagos, and Abuja from July 8 to 11 three weeks before the Afrobasket championship and right after the announcement of Rena Wakama, a University of Western Carolina alumnus and former national team player, as the team’s new coach was the last straw for her, “I have standards of how I conduct business at the professional level, and Nigeria continues to disappoint me.
“This is a national team. Generally what you do is you invite a group of professionals and you compete in a camp and then the 12 best at that camp get to compete on whatever team and that’s mostly how a national team is conducted.
“I was with my family when I got the message and I just was in shock. Playing for the national team is something that my family is proud of, that I am proud of as it holds a lot of weight for me, and the way that they conduct themselves is taking all of that away from us. It’s just so disheartening.
“I have been blessed to play with a lot of teams where I have seen professionalism from management, and I don’t see those same qualities within our federation. So to continuously keep coming back to a federation that I feel does not value me is not worth it.
“I am officially done with the national team. I cannot continue to have this added stress in my life. As a team, we try to choose our words very carefully so we do not offend anyone in the federation.
“But I’m done and my purpose of doing this is to shed light on the lack of professionalism within the federation and that it needs to change.
“It’s really difficult to not have any sense of communication, not have any sense of professionalism. All of our information comes from Twitter and social media.
“We never know what’s going on. We ask a lot of questions about just simple things of when camp is, where it will be held, and who are the coaches, and we get responses like ‘please be patient’.
“Everything that we do is super last minute. The level of professionalism is just not up to par with the constant production that we produce.”
