Senegal female basketball great, Astou Ndiaye has attributed the recent success of Nigeria’s female basketball to diversity.
It would be recalled that D’tigress reached the last eight of FIBA women Basketball world cup held in Tenerife, Spain.
D’tigress defeated World Cup, where they defeated Turkey (7th), Argentina (15th) and Greece (20th) and narrowly lost to Canada in the classification match.
The impressive outing lifted the team in world ranking as they moved by 15 places from 34th in the world to 19th in the current world ranking and are two places behind Senegal who are the best ranked team in Africa in 17th position.
Astou said Nigeria is now a country to be feared in the game, because most of its female national team players have dual citizenship by virtue of being born outside the continent.
“If you look at the landscape, a lot of them (D’Tigress) grew outside Nigeria and other places as dual citizens. Also many of the kids are able to play at higher level by going to different colleges around the world, where you have top level competition.
And when they come back to play for the national team, they improve,” Ndiaye said while in Nigeria recently for the Power Forward basketball clinic.
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