Aim is to be inside the top-8 in Asia: Veselin Matic

With the Basketball Federation of India (BFI) extending his contract with the Indian men’s senior basketball team by a year, Veselin Matic hoped to carry the side inside the top-eight in the FIBA Asia rankings.

India, ranked 12th in Asia, have shown signs of improvement over the last one year with Matic at the helm, but they have a long way to go to establish themselves as a genuine threat.

“It’s not easy to come to upper-house (higher ranking) in Asia,” said the head coach, who replaced Zoran Visic last year. “Currently, we are moving in the right way to establish basketball academies where top young talents will undergo training for an entire year with the support of BFI and Sports Authority of India (SAI).

“India’s performance has improved a lot and I have already made my future plans to take the performance of our team to the next level,” he added.

With a number of big-ticket tournaments lined up this year, the Serbian is aware of the challenges ahead and sounded prepared.

“I have made a plan till 2025 on how to change and prepare a new team which will represent us at the top level,” he recited. “I have planned to have a large pool of quality players in all age groups by 2025 and to have two teams at the senior Level followed by U-18 and U-16.

“We also have to improve and develop coaching systems parallelly,” he concluded.