A Nigerian-American professional basketball player and AfroBasket champion Oderah Chidom has said she would stop playing for Nigeria Women's basketball team due to "lack of professionalism" from the Nigeria Basketball Federation.
Chidom who announced this via her Twitter page on Monday evening said her decision was influenced by the manner in which the country’s basketball federation was regulating the affairs of players, coaches and other related matters.
“It saddens me to announce that I will no longer play for the Nigerian National Team,” she wrote on Twitter.
Explaining the reason behind her decision in a video seen by SaharaReporters on her subsequent tweet, she continued: “Of course, I will love to continue to play for something bigger than myself in representing the country that means so much to me and my family. The current federation, I can’t just continue to agree with the way they do business.”
The Nigeria Basketball Federation chose Rena Wakama, a University of Western Carolina alumnus and former national team player, as the team's new coach in June. Wakama took over for Otis Hughely, who left last year.
Wakama's hiring was followed by the announcement of open trials for the women's squad from July 8 to 11 in Chicago, Lagos, and Abuja.
Chidom also told ESPN that the open tryouts were the final straw for her after the turbulence in Nigerian basketball that led to the team's withdrawal from the FIBA World Cup.
"The trigger for me was seeing an Instagram post of open tryouts in three different locations three weeks before Afrobasket," the 27-year-old Chidom was quoted by ESPN.
She continued: "I will not be attending. I don't think that's professional at all. I consider myself a professional. And I don't think it's okay for me to pay my way to try out for something when I think I have a resume that speaks for itself.
"I have standards of how I conduct business at the professional level, and Nigeria continues to disappoint me.
"This is a national team. Generally what you do is you invite a group of professionals and you compete in a camp and then the 12 best at that camp get to compete on whatever team and that's mostly how a national team is conducted.
"I was with my family when I got the message and I just was in shock. Playing for the national team is something that my family is proud of, that I am proud of as it holds a lot of weight for me, and the way that they conduct themselves is taking all of that away from us. It's just so disheartening.
"I have been blessed to play with a lot of teams where I have seen professionalism from management, and I don't see those same qualities within our own federation. So to continuously keep coming back to to a federation that I feel does not value me is not worth it.
"I am officially done with national team. I cannot continue to have this added stress in my life. As a team, we try to choose our words very carefully so we do not offend anyone on the federation.
"But personally, I'm done and my purpose of doing this is to shed light on the lack of professionalism within the federation and that it needs to change.
"It's really difficult to not have any sense of communication, not have any sense of professionalism. All of our information comes from Twitter and social media.
"We never know what's going on. We ask a lot of questions about just simple things of when camp is, where it will be held, who are the coaches, and we get responses like 'please be patient'.
"Everything that we do is super last minute. The level of professionalism is just not up to par with the constant production that we produce."