Basketball: Integrating Mental and Physical Skills for Students

Alaa Khalifa continues to report that the Iyas bin Muadh Center, affiliated with the Summer Clubs Department of the Ministry of Education, is actively delivering its sports and educational programs aimed at productively utilizing students’ free time during the summer vacation, developing their physical and mental capacities, and promoting healthy practices through a variety of sports activities.

Shaker Mukhtar Hussein, director of the Iyas bin Muadh Summer Clubs Center, stated that the center offers specialized training programs in three sports: football, handball, and basketball. Students are divided into three academic stages: primary, intermediate, and secondary. He clarified that each stage has specific training times according to a schedule organized by the center’s administration, tailored to students’ ages and needs.

Hussein explained that the summer clubs strive to achieve a set of educational and sports objectives, foremost among which are developing students’ mental and physical abilities, instilling habits of early sleeping and healthy dietary practices, and making productive use of their time during the summer, away from inactive lifestyles.

He added that the center works to break the summer routine that may dominate some students’ lives, characterized by staying up late and excessive use of electronic devices such as iPads and smartphones, by providing an attractive sports and educational environment that allows students to engage in sports and benefit positively from their free time.

He noted that the center employs specialized trainers holding local and international certifications in sports training fields, whether in football, handball, or basketball, thereby contributing to delivering specialized training based on appropriate technical and educational foundations for students.

The center’s director addressed a message to parents, urging them to encourage their children to take advantage of the summer clubs, and expressed hope that this initiative would continue and that summer clubs would resume operations in October next year, given their importance as a valuable opportunity to discover promising sports talents.

He pointed out that the Iyas bin Muadh Center has recently identified several students who have been distributed across various sports clubs, emphasizing that summer clubs represent a genuine opportunity to uncover talents that may not have been previously known or apparent, and to guide and optimally utilize their capabilities.

For his part, Fahad Ali Al-Munir, a basketball coach at the Iyas bin Muadh Center, said that the basketball training program relies on integrating mental games with physical exercises, aiming to provide diverse training sessions that maintain students’ enthusiasm and prevent boredom or difficulty in learning sports skills.

Al-Munir clarified that the program primarily focuses on teaching students the fundamental skills of basketball, enabling them to benefit from these skills whether during their participation in the summer clubs or upon returning to their schools at the start of the new academic year.