Darkness flooded the court. There was no air conditioning to combat the triple-figure humidity. The lights would never flicker back on. No clock hung on the walls. Yet with just seven days remaining before the 2017 AfroBasket tipped in Senegal that Sept. 8, the Uganda men’s basketball team needed every minute of its scheduled two-hour practice time. And the program's players, unified by nationality yet boasting zero official practice gear, began defensive shell drills in the dead of night.
“It was the worst gym I had ever seen,” recalls the team’s head coach, George Galanopoulos. The nondescript building in Alexandria, Egypt, did provide the perfect metaphor for Team Uganda’s plight.