| 17 November 2011
Dobry Den, or "Good Day" as we say in the Czech Republic.
I would like to thank everyone for taking the time out to read my column here at Beyond the Beat.
I am from Brooklyn, New York and graduated from Seton Hall University in 1998 and have been playing overseas ever since. My first stop overseas was the Czech Republic, where I played two seasons before heading to Belgium for five weeks and then Poland for a year. I took one year off after "9-11".
I was scared to fly and thought about giving up basketball all together. A coach that I played for during my first two years in the Czech Republic kept emailing me trying to get me to come back to Czech while I was home back in New York. After working as a dispatcher for a security company in Manhattan for a year I decided I wanted to play ball again and accepted his offer and went back to the Czech Republic where I have been here ever since.
I am now in my thirtieth season overseas.
Currently, I am playing for Bk Decin in the Czech Republic with this being my second stint with Decin. I played here from 2004-07 then I left for three years and came back in 2010. I signed a three-year contract so I have another year left on my contract. We are currently in fifth place with a 9-4 record. There are fourteen teams in the league. It is a little different this season because usually when you play overseas you play against teams in your country unless you are playing in some type of European competition. But, this season they added two teams from Slovakia because they wanted to expand the league and there weren't any teams in Czech that met the criteria. Since the Czech Republic and Slovakia use to be known as Czechoslovakia, I don't think people looked at the two new teams coming in as something unusual.
The Czech league is stronger then the Slovak league so the two teams are not doing that well. Astrum Levice is in tenth place at the moment and Inter Bratislava is thirtieth.
We have 26 games in the regular season.
It means everybody plays each other twice. Then they break the league up into A1 which consist of the top six teams. They erase your record clean and you play another ten games to determine playoff seeds #1 through #6. A2 consist of the other eight teams. Their records stay where they were and they play another 14 games against each other and the top two teams will joint the other six teams in A1 for the playoffs. This is the second year of this format. So we are playing now to basically make it to the top six.
During my thirteen years of playing ball overseas, I have learned a lot and experienced more than I could have ever imagined. During my next column I will talk about some of those experiences and will also talk about my book that is coming out soon called, "A Guide to Playing Professional Basketball Overseas".
Ell Sanders is a professional basketball player with Bk Decin in the Czech Republic and has spent the last 13-season playing overseas after graduating from Seton Hall in 1998. The Pirates 19th all-time leading scorer, Sanders has also played in Belgium and Poland. For more information about his upcoming book, "A Guide to Playing Professional Basketball Overseas", visit his website or follow him on Twitter at @levellsanders. His "Inside The Overseas Game" column for Beyond the Beat will be updated regularly.
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