Science lost a chemist and basketball gained a coach. Ibon Navarro told his parents that he was leaving a well-paid job, in a position of responsibility, with employees under his command and opportunities for promotion, at the Leia Foundation in the Miñano Technology Park, near Vitoria, where he was born 48 years ago. The boy, son of a Telefónica employee and a manager of an industrial infrastructure company, had made a career: he graduated in Chemical Sciences, specialising in organic chemistry, and worked for a year in Cologne before returning home. The future looked stable, but something was stirring inside Ibon. When he got up at seven in the morning, he felt a tingling sensation if that afternoon he swapped the office and laboratory for the basketball court where he trained in the lower categories of Baskonia. As a child he played football, as a goalkeeper, until he stopped due to a knee injury. And he fell in love with the basket. As an adult, he discovered that his happiness was not in studying chemical elements, but in cultivating chemistry between players from the bench. He changed his life and today he is the coach of Unicaja Málaga, champion of the Super Cup against Madrid this past Sunday in Murcia (80-90). It is the fourth Andalusian title in a year and a half with the Vitorian coach at the helm after linking together a Cup, a FIBA Champions League and the Intercontinental Cup.
“From now on we take the pen and start writing a new story,” said the coach after beating the Whites, who had won six consecutive titles in the tournament; “We are going little by little. Cycles end and we have to stretch this one as much as possible, with our feet on the ground. It will depend on this group.”
The team Ibon is talking about is the one he has shaped since his arrival in Malaga in February 2022, signed by president Antonio Jesús López Nieto, a historic football referee. The Vitorian coach arrived wounded after his first and only dismissal, in Andorra, after managing Baskonia, Manresa and Murcia, and before gaining experience as an assistant to Spahija, Ivanovic, Scariolo, Paco Olmos and Perasovic. From that salad came his own dish, open-field basketball, with advanced defence, quick transitions, short attacks and lots of possessions. Unicaja was the team with the most recoveries per game (9.5) in the last ACB League and the second team with the most assists (19.8) after Madrid. In that section, they almost doubled the Whites (11-21) in the Super Cup final, the example of a united group without egos: all 12 men scored. “We have a lot of role players, who have assumed their roles and the values of the team. We are not a team of virtuosos but of workers, who need to generate the mistakes of the rival,” analyses Ibon.
Perry, Taylor and Osetkowski are the shining stars of the squad that is symbolised by Captain Alberto Díaz like no other. With a budget of almost 15 million, Unicaja has kept the block from last season, slightly renovated with the additions of Tillie, Tyson Pérez and Balcerowski, and the departures of Lima and Will Thomas. In its favour is a project with clear ideas, such as giving up the Euroleague due to the financial cost and physical wear and tear of so much travel, and focusing on national competitions and the FIBA Champions League. “The idea was to give people back hope and compete with the big teams. Here we all help each other, there is no star. Each one sacrifices for the other,” explains Díaz. The international point guard points to his coach as key to this growth: “Ibon is a very normal person, he listens a lot to the players. He is not an authoritarian leader. He likes to know what we think, to understand us. He is a guide.”
The coach was accompanied after the final by his son Aritz, another player in the photo of the champions, and with whom he has learned to take the tragedy out of defeats and that the atmosphere at home does not depend on whether you have won or lost. It used to happen that a bad game meant shutting yourself in, not going out to dinner, and that silence had to prevail so as not to disturb your father. That affected the boy and his father-coach changed his chip to take the sport more naturally.
It was another step in the learning process of someone who has worked hard to achieve this present of success. Today Ibon remembers, for example, when in his second year of college he was coaching four teams between the Basque League and children’s and cadet teams. He failed all his subjects and that summer he locked himself in his room. On the door he hung two cards with these messages: “Remember that you have not passed any” and “Pride”. When his friends went to the pool, he saw what was written and returned to his chair. In September he passed everything. The plan worked. As could be read on a banner in the stands of the Sports Palace in Murcia during the final: “The Ibon plan”.
