One Team supports International Day of People with Disabilities

Euroleague Basketball’s social responsibility program One Team is proud to support the International Day of People with Disabilities, which is being observed on Friday, December 3.

Supporting people with disabilities has always been one of the main focuses for One Team, with many clubs in both the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague and the 7DAYS EuroCup using the power of basketball to teach life skills and help disabled people integrate into their local communities.

Clubs working in that area this season are: AS Monaco, Boulogne Metropolitans 92, Buducnost VOLI Podgorica, Cedevita Olimpija Ljubljana, Crvena Zvezda mts Belgrade, CSKA Moscow, FC Bayern Munich, LDLC ASVEL Villeurbanne, Lokomotiv Kuban Krasnodar, Mincidelice JL Bourg en Bresse, Olympiacos Piraeus, Panathinaikos OPAP Athens, Promitheas Patras, Real Madrid, ratiopharm Ulm, Zalgiris Kaunas and Zenit St Petersburg.

To coincide with the international day of celebration, One Team’s proud partner Special Olympics is also celebrating the 18th edition of its annual European Basketball week between November 27 and December 6. This initiative offers a week of activities where everyone in the basketball community across Europe is encouraged to expand opportunities for players with intellectual disabilities, including more than 10,000 participants in at least 30 countries.

More than 200 local or national basketball events – such as Unified Youth Basketball, 3×3 competitions, mini-basketball and women’s basketball – have been planned across the continent for players with and without intellectual disabilities at all ability levels.

One event that took place on Thursday, December 2, was a webinar organized by Special Olympics, featuring a presentation on the subject of healthy relationships within basketball by Filip Sunturlic, General Manager of Crvena Zvezda mts Belgrade, as one of the speakers.

During the last six seasons, Special Olympics has been one of Zvezda’s strategic partners, both working together to complete various projects and events, including sporting activities, training sessions, Christmas events, and programs such as Learning2Play, Win2Smile, Play4Glory, IDEA Play, Run and Have Fun.

Sunturlic emphasized the importance of the partnership as he said: “Crvena Zvezda mts Belgrade, as we emphasize on every occasion, wants to use its strength and greatness to draw people’s attention to very important things for our society. Our sport is beautiful precisely because it connects people. Our cooperation with the Special Olympics of Serbia is such that it transcends partnership relations and is based on friendship. We have been building this for years, through numerous projects and showing that there are no limits for us.”

One Team, supported by Turkish Airlines as the One Team Founding Patron and with the collaboration of Special Olympics as Proud Partner, uses basketball to achieve real social impact in our communities.

With an innovative model of interconnectedness across an entire continent, Euroleague Basketball and its clubs have developed a complete CSR program that brings together activities from each team in an integrated, impactful way, working under a theme of community integration that actively addresses targets of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10 on Reduced Inequalities.

Each participating club develops a specific One Team project tailored to its own community needs to benefit groups in danger of exclusion due to problems such as substance abuse and gender, physical or intellectual disability. Since its founding in 2012, the One Team program has already reached, directly and indirectly, more than 23,000 participants through its various team projects.