Our First Basketball Camp in Mauritania

We were honored to help host a basketball camp in partnership with the Noura Foundation in Mauritania in July 2023.

16 girls and 19 boys ages 12-14 years old, along with 13 coaches from around the country, came to participate in the camp.

We split the camp up into two sections to avoid the hottest part of the day, one session at 9am-11am, then the second session from 5pm-7pm. Stephen looked at his phone at one point and the UV index was 11 out of 10, but with lots of water and adrenaline, the kids were engaged and ready to learn.

We were thankful for donors that helped fund several custom Leather + Iron gifts that we were able to bring over. As we started passing out Leather + Iron jerseys and Spaulding basketballs in their country colors, you could feel the players energy growing. That was good, because we pushed them hard physically and mentally! 

For the physicality of the camp, we did drills in ball handling, passing, shooting, transition offense and transition defense. The coaches loved learning as we coached their players (some of them ready to try out some new strategies as soon as their next game! 😄).

Mentally, we had four themes to our camp: Encouragement, Servanthood, Effort, and Leadership. Throughout the camp, we helped them try to embody those character traits into how they played basketball and lived life.

We are so proud of the coaches and players for giving their all to this camp. Thank you to the Basketball Federation of Mauritania for their invitation; we look forward to doing another camp in the near future!

And thank you to our donors that rallied together last minute to make this event possible. These kids walked away with a life-changing experience and incredible growth in their sport. 

Special thanks to the Basketball Federation for providing these photos!