NLP’s March Break Sessions always evolving
Celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2019, No Limit Performance has become the go-to basketball training destination in Niagara.
“Ten years is crazy,” founder Mihai Raducanu said, with a laugh. “It started in a driveway and look at it now.”
And while NLP reminisces about 10 great years, its annual March Break Tune Up Sessions, scheduled for March 11 to March 15 at the new Pelham Community Centre, have actually been around for 11 years.
“It was at Collegiate and I remember we had nine kids show up and I kicked one kid out,” Raducanu said. “I gave him his cheque back and told him it wasn’t for him. It wasn’t a babysitting camp.”
It has been quite a while since he has had to send a kid packing.
“The word is pretty clear on the streets and we don’t get those kind of kids any more, even at the younger ages,” he said.
In the early years of the March Break sessions, Raducanu would bring former teammates up who played NCAA Division 1 basketball with him at Coastal Carolina in South Carolina.
“I’d pay for their flights, I’d house them in my house, I’d feed them and I’d give them any extra money I had,” he said. “I never made a dime on March Break camps, but it was such a good thing for the kids.”
As No Limit grew, so did its stable of basketball trainers and the camp became an in-house way of further developing its own personnel.
This year’s staff at the camp will include Raducanu, Mike Hurley, Court Kilyk, Brittany MacFarlane, Scott Noftall and others, including older players who have been training with NLP for years.
Raducanu is loathe to call the week a camp.
“I call it a tune up because it is a transition right now,” he said. “It’s a transition from the high school season to the club season for the boys especially and, for the girls, it’s dead time.
‘There’s nowhere for them to go so they come to get tuned up.”
For the younger girls, it’s chance to sharpen their skills with the Basketball Ontario play downs looming on the horizon.
The goal of the camp is to improve every facet of a player’s game.
Each three-hour session includes 90 minutes of on-court basketball training.
“The focus for the last two years is decision making with the basketball because they are not really doing that in games well enough,” he said.
There’s also 30 minutes of athletic development with the Niagara Health and Rehab Centre.
“They have been doing all our stuff, we send all our athletes there and they have been doing a really good job with them,” Raducanu said.
The camp used to include 30 minutes a day in the classroom and that has been boosted to 60. Topics include leadership, nutrition, athletes reaching their potential, attitude, goal setting, fear of failure, dealing with disappointments and much more.
“It’s crucial,” Raducanu said. “More and more we realize it’s your body and your mind that become even more key as you progress in sports.”
Every year, the camp continues to evolve as Raducanu and his fellow trainers evolve.
“I go out there and seek knowledge from people who are way better than me; from hall of famers to people who teach the game at a high level, to people who coach the game at a high level,” he said. “Every time I show up in the gym, I am better than yesterday.”
Crucial to any NLP training is a player’s ability to execute in a team setting.
‘You have to be able to drive and kick, you have to know what to do after you set a screen and you have to know what to do without the ball,” Raducanu. “I have learned more about all that stuff and I pass that knowledge on to the kids.
“Every year I say this is the best year and, right now, this is going to be the best session yet.”
The sessions are divided into three age groups, not counting Mini Ballers.
The scheduled times are: Grades 4-6, 8 a.m. to 11 a.m.; Grades 7-8, 9 a.m to noon; Grades 9-12, 11 a.m to 2 p.m.; and, Mini Ballers, 2 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Each group has been capped at a maximum of 20 players.
Raducanu feels the sessions are another way to make a positive impact on kids on and off the court.
“Every day they leave with two or three new things that they have learned and we create a positive impact that is more than just about basketball,” he said.
The cost for the camp is $150 for the week for players in Grades 4 to 13 and $20 a session for the Mini Ballers. Players who can’t make the entire week can email MacFarlane (brittany@nolimitperformance.ca) and a pro-rated price will be determined.
