By Peter Toth
This is Croatia, where we managed to get to the training of the Cibona youth team, boys from the year 1999. If it is Croatia one certainly expects tradition and talent, paired with extraordinary physical abilities we have seen in many of the great old guys (like Toni Kukoc or Dino Radja) and also with numerous young players, like Dario Saric -at the pic with our boy- and others. So we are so-to-say prepared, but what we get with the first glimpse at the year 1999 basketball team exceeds these expectations. The team is dynamic, agile and tall. Many of the boys already well above 190 with their 14 years, but the center of the team towers above all of them at least with a head. His game during the practice shows him a player who is well aware of his extraordinary abilities, making him undefeatable in rebounding and blocking, but his raw stature would definitely need more weight, muscle and also the resulting confidence. Remembering the old saying, however, that “you cannot teach height”, I immediately decided to know more about the boy. His friends around me proudly tell me that the guy I see is Kresimir Nikic, the center of the cadet team of KK Cibona and also of the national U14 representation of Croatia about whom we have already published in Eurohopes.
When approaching him after training the first thing I have to face is the towering presence of a schoolboy who has just turned 14 this April, but my 1.77m forehead can barely reach his shoulders. So my first question, understandably, relates his most conspicuous feature, height.
- I am 207 cm without shoes and about 209-210 in my trainers, but I am still growing – he says with a ring of pride in his voice. I have always been taller than anyone around me, at 10 I passed 180 with a size 45 shoe and then added 10-15 centimeters every year, tipping 2m at 13 and growing rapidly over that and also all normal doorframes – he adds with a laugh.
Given this size and the fact that both of his parents were ballers (mum a 180 cm play in the legendary Jugoplastika Split and dad with his 198cm was playing for a while in KK Cibona), basketball may have looked like an easy go, but he started with something else instead.
- At the age of 4, I started swimming in Mladost Zagreb and was doing it for eight years. I liked it very much. It was good for my health and my back too, because I was already very tall. But when with 8 years I reached 165cm, basketball looked sort of a must, so I began to practice besides swimming. I started in a small club called Zapad, which is a branch of Cibona. But I soon joined Cibona itself and also my trainer Josef Dulibic who has been following me since my very first basketball steps. For another four years I have been doing swimming and basketball together. These were hard times not so much for myself, but rather for my parents, who were driving all day from pool to basketball, not only me but also my brother and sister (12 year old twins). I was really successful at swimming, especially in backstroke. I won a lot of medals and also a second place in the national championship. But after a year of practice basketball started to attract me more and more. We won many titles in Croatia and abroad alike and were national champions too. So at 12, passing 185cm and being invited to National U14 team, to choose between swimming and basketball became unavoidable.
