LKL

As from Saturday Ilias Zouros is the new head coach of Zalgiris Kaunas. Zouros is one of the best young Greek coaches. At the age of 44 now, Zouros is a head coach since the 2000-01 season, though he was an assistant coach (or a head coach of junior teams) for more or less than a decade before that.

His first job was probably the toughest there could be as, when Giannis Ioannidis stepped down as coach of Olympiacos in the summer of 2000 (more like… fired by Kokkalis), he recommended his assistant for the job, a young guy named Ilias Zouros and nicknamed… “The Computer” for his amazing skills with numbers, statistics and tactical plays. Ioannidis was reported to have said that Zouros was the next big Greek coach.

Zouros was only 34 years old at that point, he had served for only one year as assistant coach in Olympiacos and, when he accepted the job of being the head coach of the team, he wasn’t welcomed by many fans and members of the administration of the team. Apart from that, Kokkalis had chosen most of the roster already, a roster that featured huge players like Dino Radja, David Rivers, Milan Tomic and Nikos Ekonomou. Huge players with… huge egos, players that were determined to drive Zouros “crazy”. The fact that Zouros was… younger than David Rivers, only one year older than Dino Radja and also an assistant coach in the team the previous season, made his job very difficult.

His star players never respected him the way they should have, Olympiacos suffered way too many cases of indiscipline during the season, Rivers and Radja never accepted their coach as superior to them and a figure that they should respect, no matter how hard Zouros tried (Radja even tried to sub himself in during one game by demanding to do so!). Zouros even brought a sports psychologist to help with the frictions inside the team, but the players opposed that move as well.

Olympiacos wasn’t successful with Zouros at their helm and his era at the club ended after one and a half year (January 2002), when he was replaced by Subotic. It is way too hard to bounce back from a start like that. Fans and voices from inside the Greek team fought Zouros hard from the first day he started working at Olympiacos. After he was fired he was more or less stamped as a failure, as a coach that didn’t live up to the expectations everyone had for him.

That led him to leave Greece and head for Lebanon. He stayed in Sagesse Beirut for one season, reached Lebanese Cup final, won the Lebanese Championship and the Asian Club Championships, being named as coach of the year in Lebanon. I know what you’ll say: “Come on, it still is Lebanon”. I agree. Lebanon. He knew almost nothing of the league and the players but he went there and was successful from day one. That year was his passport back, but the road to the highest level was too hard and bumpy.

He started the 2005-06 season with Aris, but left before 2005 was over and headed to France for a stint with Paris Racing (now named Paris-Levallois after a merge in 2007) at a period when the team was hit by financial problems (and eventually merged with Levallois and was relegated to ProB). Zouros seemed to find… “peace” when he returned to Greece in the midst of the 2007-08 season to coach Panellinios. He had 3 very successful years with Panellinios, showing his true potentials and value. Panellinios finished 5th in the league in 2007-08 and 2008-09 and 4th last year, after having its most successful year in its history in Europe.

With Zouros at its helm Panellinios reached the quarterfinals of Eurocup (for the first time in the team’s history Panellinios reached the quarterfinals of a European competition) but didn’t stop there. Zouros, against all odds, guided Panellinios to the Eurocup final four. Afterwards, Panellinios finished 4th in Greek League (highest place for Panellinios since the 1977-78 season).

Zouros left Panellinios in the summer of 2010 realizing that his high ambitions could not be met by the club’s current financial situation and that his era at the team was over. He waited and a couple of days ago Zalgiris called him and gave him the opportunity to coach at Euroleague level again.

Ilias Zouros currently holds two records. The one is that he coached Olympiacos at the historic first game of the new Euroleague in October 2000 in Madrid. The other record is that he becomes the first Greek coach to ever coach a foreign team in Euroleague.

The start of his career was a major setback for him (especially for his reputation within Greece), since he wasn’t ready for Olympiacos at that point. But he bounced back. He is an amazing coach now, matured really well over the years and last year he was named “coach of the year” in Eurocup.

Of course, I don’t know whether Zouros will be successful in Zalgiris. But be sure of that: he has all the ability, potential and ambition to be successful. This is a chance he was waiting for, the timing is perfect for him and if Zalgiris is patient and professional in their approach towards their new coach this will be a… win-win situation. It has started to seem that Ioannidis wasn’t wrong at his “prophecy” after all…

Nikos Kousoulis