We didn’t come to Valencia to be sold. We came to learn what all the European training is really about. A full week on the ground at Europrobasket — in the gym, on the courts, around the coaches — and by day two it was clear this wasn’t another camp with a highlight reel and a hashtag.

We’ve sat through our share of camps. The kind where they put you in a gym, run a few drills, throw you into pickup, and call it development. You know the ones. Europrobasket is built on the opposite instinct — and once you’re inside it, the difference is impossible to unsee.

The Story Behind It

Every real program starts with someone who saw a gap and refused to leave it alone. For Europrobasket, that’s Brad Kanis.

Kanis didn’t inherit a basketball career — he earned one the hard way. A guard out of Portland, Oregon, he chased the game across the planet: North and South America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East. He even got a look with the Houston Rockets Summer League in 2008, sharing the floor with Yao Ming. He learned the lesson most American players never get told — that talent alone doesn’t travel, and the European game demands a different IQ, a different pace, a different approach entirely.

That lesson became the mission. He’d watched too many capable players get overlooked — not because they couldn’t hoop, but because nobody taught them how to adapt, how to translate their game to Europe and actually earn a contract. So in 2015 he launched Europrobasket in Girona to do exactly that. The vision outgrew the building fast — a single shared court can only hold so much.

The turn came in 2017, when Valencia Basket — one of the most respected clubs on the continent — invited Kanis to move the academy into L’Alqueria del Basket, their state-of-the-art home: thirteen courts, nine of them indoors. That’s when Europrobasket became what we walked into this week — a genuinely legit development program pulling players from twelve to sixteen countries at a time.

Development With Intent

Here’s what separates it from the sea of “elite” camps: intention. Every session we watched had a purpose behind it. The program is built to actually develop players — take what you already do well and translate it into the version of your game that gets you signed in Europe.

That means real training and real prep for the college and pro pathways, not a weekend of reps and a t-shirt. Whether you’re an American trying to break into the European system or a hooper who needs legitimate exposure and a real route to the next level, the whole thing is engineered to get you there — deliberately, step by step.

The Coaching & The IQ

This is where the program earns its reputation, and it’s the part that stuck with us most. The coaches are certified European professionals who’ve lived the game at the level you’re chasing. No volunteers winging it. No former players coasting on a name.

And more than skill work, the premium here is on basketball IQ and team play — the exact piece most American players are missing when they land overseas, and the piece Europrobasket treats as non-negotiable. You learn to read the game the way the European system demands: smarter movement, better decisions, real command of team concepts. Development from the neck up as much as the legs down. From an experience-and-coaching standpoint, it’s the best-run program we’ve been around.

The Facilities

L’Alqueria del Basket is the real thing — thirteen courts, nine indoors, all under the roof of one of Europe’s premier clubs. This isn’t a rented rec-center gym with the lights half on. It’s a world-class environment where you train, compete, and get seen without leaving the campus. And with players in from twelve to sixteen countries at once, the level of competition every single day is legit.

Then there’s the city. Valencia is one of the most beautiful, livable places in Spain — sun, coastline, food, and a pace that makes a hard week of work feel like something you actually want to come back to. It doesn’t hurt the pitch. It closes it.