China connections score points for academy.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Bruce O'Neil has great connections.

And the incipient journey of 10 Chinese teenagers to his basketball academy near Blue River is rooted in his almost decadelong friendship with a man named Yeoh Choo Hook.

The United States Basketball Academy's 1998 agreement with FIBA-Asia - that continent's chapter of basketball's international governing body - to provide training, coaching and other technical assistance, was engineered by Yeah Choo, FIBA-Asia's secretary general.

Yeah Choo met O'Neil in 1997 through their mutual friend, former Louisiana State University basketball coach Dale Brown.

"Oh, my gosh! This is a place we have to focus," O'Neil says he told himself, after that first trip to China in 1997, upon seeing the nation's basketball interest.

It's a deal that epitomized Asia's commitment to improving the quality of its basketball over the next decade, all the way to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, says O'Neil, who grew up in Roseburg and coached basketball at the University of Hawaii in the 1970s.

FIBA-Asia represents 42 countries and more than 320 million men and women playing basketball from youth leagues through the professional ranks.

With such fertile ground for opportunity, it's no wonder O'Neil just recently completed his 50th trip to China since the USBA opened in 1997.

This latest trip - which O'Neil made with his son, Brady O'Neil, who works in international marketing for the USBA, and Jim Schmit, one of the academy's initial investors - set the groundwork for basketball camps that will be held this summer in Shanghai, Guangzhou and the capital city of Beijing.

The latter camp will include a basketball festival in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, O'Neil says, with a 3-by-3 tournament, music, entertainment and, hopefully, NBA players signing autographs.

"We have the best connections of anyone in the world in China," O'Neil said last summer, when the second annual draft of the Chinese Basketball Association was held - not in China but up the McKenzie River at the academy.

The USBA started with O'Neil's dream of establishing summer camps for training American players in a place where they could mingle with NBA legends. After years of financial struggles and opposition from some wary property owners along the McKenzie River, he opened the academy in 1997.

Now, the USBA's affiliation with China is 60 percent of O'Neil's business.

China is so much a part of the equation that the USBA now has offices in Shanghai and Beijing, the two largest cities in the world's most populous nation.

While the heart of the USBA is on 46 acres near Blue River, the USBA's main office is in Springfield. USBA has 11 full-time employees, including Bruce O'Neil's other son, Matt O'Neil, who played basketball at Churchill High School just like Brady did, and who manages the Blue River complex; and former NBA player Darrell Imhoff.

In addition to the current crop of teenage players that are here, the USBA also held a first-ever "coaching institute" for Chinese coaches for one month last fall. After the camp, the coaches landed internships with the college basketball staffs at Oregon, Utah, Gonzaga and Kansas.

Within five years, O'Neil's goal is to have "well over 100 coaches go through here" annually from China, he says.

"And that would give us an army of coaches to rely on for our grass-roots programs in China," he says.

Fifteen different facilities in the nation want USBA-affiliated academies, O'Neil says. The Guangzhou Sports Bureau in the Guangzhou Province northeast of Vietnam will open a

USBA satellite academy in March, he says.

"We have to grow slowly because of manpower and we want quality," O'Neil says. "We want to make sure everything we do is top quality."

In recent years, the USBA has been focusing on gathering sponsorships in China, from such familiar American institutions as McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Motorola, Adidas and Nike, O'Neil says.

"Our brand is really strong institution-wise," he says. "Now we're trying for consumer sponsors."

The USBA also is making deals with the companies that have provided materials at the academy here - from companies that make strength conditioning equipment, to basketball floors to high-end basketball hoops.

In exchange for providing such services, the USBA helps the manufacturers penetrate the Chinese market, O'Neil says.

"We're creating a package," he says.

Aacer Flooring, for example, has made a deal with the national training center in Beijing to put in 35,000 square feet of basketball flooring for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, thanks to its connection with the USBA, O'Neil says.

"They want things from American businesses because America is still considered the epitome of basketball," he says.

- Mark Baker

BASKETBALL ACADEMY

For more information go to www.usbachina.com