Women’s basketball faces grassroots crisis

The recent WKBL rookie draft exposed the poor grassroots foundation of women’s basketball in Korea, with local prospects losing out to overseas Korean players.

KBS has prepared a series of reports exploring ways to develop women’s basketball.

For the first report, reporter Ha Moo-rim looks into the reality of women’s basketball, which is facing a crisis at its very roots.

In this year’s women’s professional basketball rookie draft, overseas Korean players were overwhelmingly dominant, with 28-year-old Korean-Japanese player Kaneda selected first overall.

By contrast, only two homegrown Korean players were selected in the first round, and even youth national team players were left undrafted.

The players who made it through the narrow gateway and heard their names called, as well as their younger teammates, shed tears of joy.

Why are Korean prospects increasingly being edged out of the professional draft?

To find the answer, we visited high school basketball programs, the foundation of women’s basketball in Korea.

Seoul's Soongeui Girls’ High School is a prestigious school that produced key members of the 1984 Olympic silver-medal team Park Chan-sook and Kim Young-hee, as well as WNBA player Park Ji-hyun.

Last year, the school's basketball team had no registered players at all and was on the verge of being disbanded, but it survived thanks to newly appointed coach Go Ah-ra.

[Go Ah-ra/Soongeui Girls’ High School coach: "I heard the basketball team was on the verge of being disbanded. My alma mater was at risk of disappearing, and I felt I couldn’t just stand by and watch."]

After making every effort to recruit players, the team has grown to nine members, but the reality facing women’s basketball remains difficult.

[Go Ah-ra/Soongeui Girls’ High School coach: "I thought things were somewhat serious when I was playing, but after retiring and coming back to see the situation, it was getting much more serious. I think we’re at stage three of the most serious crisis."]

The number of girls’ high school basketball teams, which once exceeded 20, has now fallen to 19, and some schools are so short on players that they even worry about being able to compete if just one or two players are absent.

[Go Ah-ra/Soongeui Girls’ High School coach: "In the past, there were so many good players that they probably wondered, ‘Who should we take?’ But now it’s the opposite: ‘Where should we find them?’"]

The crisis is expected to accelerate if even prestigious basketball programs continue to struggle to maintain their existence.

The problem is that it is also difficult to retain promising players who have been painstakingly developed all the way through the system.