“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 own federation. So to continuously keep coming back to to a federation that I feel does not value me is not worth it.”
Oderah Chidom, a Nigerian-American professional basketball player, says she is “officially done” with the Nigerian national women basketball team, D’Tigress.
Chidom who announced this via her Twitter page on Monday said her decision was influenced by the Nigerian Basketball Federation’s, NBBF, lack of professionalism.
It saddens me to announce that I will no longer play for the Nigerian National Team. pic.twitter.com/Ni1CV9Kjgq
— Oderah Chidom (@Deezy_Go) July 10, 2023
“I have standards of how I conduct business at the professional level, and Nigeria continues to disappoint me,” she told ESPN in an interview.
She decried the manner in which the management of the NBBF was running the affairs of the basketball body, including the poor dissemination of information to players.
In her words, “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 own federation. So to continuously keep coming back to to a federation that I feel does not value me is not worth it.
“I am officially done with 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 on the federation.
“But personally, 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.”
She continued, “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, 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.”
Chidom told ESPN that NBBF’s announcement of open tryouts for the women’s team in Chicago, Lagos and Abuja from July 8 to 11 was the ‘trigger’ for her resignation.
“The trigger for me was seeing an Instagram post of open tryouts in three different locations three weeks before Afrobasket,” the 27-year-old Chidom said.
“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.”
She said though she would love to continue to play for the national team because it “means so much to me and my family”, NBBF’s mode of operation is a discouragement.
“Of course, I would love to continue to play for something that’s bigger than myself and represent my country,” Chidom added.
“That means so much to me and my family. But the current federation, I just cannot continue to agree with the way they do business.”
