{"id":35811,"date":"2021-02-09T11:05:07","date_gmt":"2021-02-09T10:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.demo.olimpia.iquii.info\/wojciechowski-olimpia-surprised-me-now-i-want-to-help-as-much-as-i-can\/"},"modified":"2021-02-09T11:05:07","modified_gmt":"2021-02-09T10:05:07","slug":"wojciechowski-olimpia-surprised-me-now-i-want-to-help-as-much-as-i-can","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.olimpiamilano.com\/en\/wojciechowski-olimpia-surprised-me-now-i-want-to-help-as-much-as-i-can\/","title":{"rendered":"Wojciechowski: “Olimpia surprised me, now I want to help as much as I can”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jakub Wojciechowski was 15 when he was proposed to move to Treviso.<\/strong> He was a kid with a great basketball body, he was tall and in love with basketball. Kuba is from Lodz, a city of about 700,000 citizens now, a city that was drained during World War II when the population was reduced in half. Lodz is also the place where this story begins. \u201cI came to Treviso and didn\u2019t care or think about the consequences of that choice. For me – he says – it was about changing city, but still playing basketball in a sports hall with a different jersey and different teammates. All the rest, the language barrier, the cultural differences, or the difficulties of living in a foreign country at a very young age, with no parents or family members with me, I really didn’t think about it at all. That experience made me grow faster and made me the person that I am now. Somebody tipped Treviso, they came to see me play in some youth tournaments, it all started like this.”<\/p>\n

The Benetton head coach at that time was Ettore Messina<\/strong>, in his third season in Treviso. Kuba became in effect a Benetton player around that time. And as he spent more than four years in Treviso\u2019s youth system, he also became an Italian by formation. \u201cBy now I’m fifty-fifty, half Italian and half Polish,\u201d he says smiling. Since then, he has played on several Italian teams, including Cremona, Capo d\u2019Orlando and Brindisi, probably where he had the best seasons. “In Capo d\u2019Orlando and Brindisi, the system was perfect for me, it was based on moving the ball, hit the open man and take what the defense is giving, and the coach\u2019s confidence allowed me to completely express myself. I also had experiences teammates that helped me a lot. Basketball has never been a matter of one player only,” he says. At Orlandina, he averaged 8.9 points and 6.1 rebounds (10.2 and 4.3 rebounds in the BCL); the following year in Brindisi he had 5.3 points and 3.1 rebounds but in just 12 minutes, off the bench.<\/p>\n