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Former UNCG star Kyle Hines is embarking on a basketball adventure, playing for Prima Veroli of the Italian Lega 2. As Hines plays his first season abroad, he will provide regular updates on his experiences for the News & Record.

I would like to welcome everyone to the SportsExtra blog at News-Record.com. I guess you can kind of say I'm a blog veteran, having done one previously for the News & Record and one last year when I blogged the experiences of my senior season at NCAA.org. I had such a great experience and received really good feedback while writing the other blogs, so I wanted to start another where I could share my experiences from my first professional season in Italy.

For those who may not know me, I want to give you some background information. I'm originally from Sicklerville, N.J. I just graduated from UNCG this past year and was a member of the men's basketball team for four years. I left the university after breaking many records and even got my number retired before the end of my senior season. Because I had a successful college career, I have the opportunity to pursue a professional basketball career. After I participated in numerous NBA camps and a summer league, I chose to sign with a team in Italy called Prima Veroli.

The team is located in Veroli, a very small town about 60 miles outside of Rome. The town's population is less than 20,000. To put that in perspective, the Greensboro Coliseum holds about 23,000 people. If you were to put all of Veroli in the coliseum, you still wouldn't be able to sell out the arena.

Veroli is one of those towns where literally everyone knows everything about everyone. It is an old Roman mountain town, and some of the residents still use what we would consider outdated methods for handling some of their daily chores. For example, there is a huge watering hole in the middle of the town that many of the residents use to wash their clothes by hand.

I couldn't imagine having to wash clothes every day like that. God bless whoever invented the washing machine.

Everything in the organization is brand new this year. New management, new coach, new staff and only two players left from last season's team. Last season was the team's first in this division (the second highest level of professional basketball in Italy) and like many first-year teams they struggled. (Much like in U.S. professional baseball, there are five divisions in Italian professional basketball: A1, A2, B1, B2 and C2. Veroli is in its second season in A2 or Liga 2.)

The sponsors and management are hoping for a turnaround from last season, when the team went 11-19 and finished 12th out of 16 teams.

I've been here for almost five weeks and I have found the transition from life in the States to life in Italy not as hard as I thought it would be. The team personnel and the players have gone out of their way to make me feel as comfortable as possible.

The hardest part is the language barrier. Even though every day I'm learning more and more Italian, I still haven't learned enough to carry a full conversation. I only know the basic fundaments of the language, like how to say "Hello" and "Thank you" and "What is your name?"

Hopefully, in a few months I will be able to learn enough to actually carry a full conversation and understand what the other person is saying. I've downloaded a couple of audio books onto my iPod that I hope will help me learn the language.

Before I came here, many of my friends who had played in Europe kept telling me how hard the preseason training camps were. They were telling me stories of how they did these crazy drills and ran miles and miles in the mountains. After hearing those stories, I was expecting the worst. But for the most part our training camp hasn't been as hard as I expected.

Don't get me wrong — it is not easy. We still do a lot of work. In the morning, we usually lift weights and do some type of conditioning. Then we have a light practice in the morning where we do drills working on our fundamentals or we run through the plays. In the evening at 5:30, we have a hard practice for about two hours. We have been following this schedule for about four weeks. Once the regular season starts, we will only have one practice a week.

The European style of basketball is a lot different than the American style. I found the transition between the two to be a difficult process for the first few weeks of practice.

For the past four months before coming to Europe, I was learning the NBA style of basketball. The European style is a complete 180 of everything I was taught for those four months. For example, the NBA game is based more on isolations for players to take their opponent one-on-one. The European game is based more on team-oriented concepts.

American players use more of the athletic nature of their games, and the NBA and other American leagues tailor their systems to this. The European players base their game more on fundamentals.

The court design is also different from American courts. The lane (or painted area) in Europe is shaped like a trapezoid, while in America it has more of a rectangular design. For a player like me who plays primarily in the post, this has been a really big transition. The trapezoid places the offensive post players about 3 feet farther from the basket than the American design. The trapezoid gives more of an advantage to the defender in the post. I know it may sound like a small thing, but in basketball, positioning and spacing can make a big difference.

I think this may be enough for my first entry. I just wanted to give you an introduction to my life so far in Italy. For my next post, I will include more insights and discuss my first professional games in Italy.

I hope you will continue to follow me as I make a transition to my new life on and off the court. Thank you for all the support.

Ciao,
Kyle