Latina, a summer basketball tournament named after the former CONI president and basketball player Pino D’Alessandro organized

The first edition of a basketball tournament which will take place in the summer in Piazza del Popolo was presented in the conference room of the Circolo Cittadino di Latina. A group of sports enthusiasts who are organizing the event have decided to dedicate it to Pino D’Alessandro, former president of CONI and a basketball player of great value
PORTRAIT OF ALEXANDER PINE
Pino D’Alessandro, for 36 uninterrupted years, held the position of provincial president of the Coni of Latina and for a long period municipal councilor for sport, leaving profound traces of his long and active work. D’Alessandro died in February 2012. It takes ten years – according to current legislation – to name something after a deceased person, only a decision by the Prefect can affect the practice, as happened on the occasion of the naming of the stadium after Nicola Bianchini. The ideal facility would be the municipal athletics field – in via Botticelli – for many years called “Campo Coni” by all Latin people. D’Alessandro has introduced thousands of kids to practice sports for free, taking advantage of the fact that the possibility of dedicating themselves to fun and recreational activities is a real right, enshrined in the UN convention on the rights of children. This right is often forgotten, even at youth sports level. The president of CONI has never stopped, he has always organized national and international events at the highest level, helped build dozens of facilities, promoted sport in schools, created competitive teams that reached the top levels. He arrived in the Pontine capital in 1950, from Benevento, where he practiced basketball successfully, also wearing the prestigious jersey of Partenope Napoli: a top-notch pivot, elegant in his movements, gritty in defence. He played a match of great importance between Latina and San Saba Roma, literally fleeing from the civil hospital where he had been admitted after an accident, with 44 stitches in one leg. He fainted on the pitch of the Circolo Cittadino arena, the Nerazzurri won and he returned in an ambulance to his hospital ward. In Latina D’Alessandro immediately stood out for his industriousness, like an erupting volcano. His is a compelling and significant story, made up of many works created, Youth Games, free swimming courses for the children of the villages with buses that accompanied them to the pool. Whoever knocked on the door of Coni always found a hand ready to open. The proverbial rescue at the last minute of Latina Calcio which, excluded from the Serie C championship, was only able to participate thanks to the decisive interest of Pino D’Alessandro who, in August 1983, signed 150 million bills to personal title – something few remember – fully honoring the debt contracted with the League. In the role of organizer, Pino prepared, down to the smallest detail, the opening ceremony of the renovated Olympic stadium in Rome, on the occasion of the Italia 90 World Cup, the fabulous summer basketball tournaments at Palazzo Emme saw the presence of renowned European teams and American broadcasts live on Rai, as for the Italy-USA match at the Latina sports hall in 1980. Thanks to the contribution of the Credito Sportivo, the president of the Pontine Coni built more than one hundred facilities, as evidenced by all the documents that appear in the autobiographical book “Il President.” D’Alessandro has always defended the right to play of a boy condemned to remain sadly inert on the bench because his team managers judged him to be too “poor” to take the field. He was a manager ready to believe that such an approach to youth sport was not really good for kids, he defended the right of all minors to play and have fun, he thought of those kids who risk being left out of sport because they don’t have the ability or even just the interest in dedicating oneself to practicing it in a competitive way. D’Alessandro was generous with prestigious awards for those who dedicated their lives to sport, in particular to all the military sports centres, he still looked to entertainment and aggregation as a reference purpose, which is not the same in a large part of today’s sports clubs . There, the temptation is strong to select and train the most promising players and leave the “wimps” to be the eternal bench players. Pino strongly believed in the educational function of sport, and that it is an innate right of childhood, which does not accept discrimination.