In Lithuania, basketball is more a game. It’s a religion.

How it started How it’s going

That’s me last week in Vilnius, Lithuania, where I had the good fortune to spend several days leading the “Toward the Development of Sports Diplomacy: Understanding, Exchanging, Realizing” workshop hosted by the National Sports Agency. You can read more about that fantastic experience and set of exchanges here and here. Being in one of the Baltic meccas of basketball prodded me to think more deeply about the game, ignited my creative flair, and inspired this series.

For basketball in Lithuania is more than a game. Several people, including sports journalists, explained to me how it was more akin to a religion for this country of nearly 3 million people.

Recent history holds no quibbles. One of the NBA players featured in the recent Netflix docuseries “Starting Five” is Lithuanian Domantas Sabonis, who helped inscribe his family and background into modern NBA fan culture. Readers older than GenZ will recall that his father, Arvydas, played eight years with the Portland Trailblazers from 1995 until 2003, helped to usher in the post-U.S. Dream Team generation of international players in the league, and further wrote Lithuania into the mental map of North American hoop heads. Sabonis fils was a 2015 vice European champion with the national team – a side that in this second era of Lithuanian independence has notched one EuroBasket championship (2003), three vice championships (1995, 2013, 2015) and a bronze (2007); one FIBA World Cup bronze (2010), and three Olympic bronze medals (1992, 1996, 2000) alongside fourth place finishes at the Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008 Summer Games.

But some of the most exciting basketball news from Lithuania this year occurred during April’s WNBA draft when the Golden State Valkyries selected Juste Jocyte. The “baby-faced assassin” is a sensation-generator ever since her debut at age 14 with her professional club, ASVEL Lyon (the club owned by Tony Parker), when she became the French league’s youngest professional. W audiences must wait another year to see her in action in person, for Jocyte will remain in Europe this year to help her country in their EuroBasket campaign. And that’s where she has tantalizing potential to help boost “Brand Lithuania” for despite claiming the EuroBasket crown in 1997, the national women’s team has not yet achieved much podium successes in international competition since 1990.

It's a track record at odds with the role of basketball in Lithuania, for the game was first played by women in the immediate post-World War One era. As Dr. Vilma Cingiene, my host last week at Lithuania’s National Sport Agency and herself a former player for the Soviet women’s national team, wrote in her 2010 article exploring basketball and Lithuanian identity, at that time

“Women basketball players represented the cultural elite of the country and, even though strongly criticized by men for taking up the game, within two years they witnessed the beginning of an American version of men’s basketball promoted by the YMCA (the Young Men’s Christian Association, a body organized by American Christian missionaries).” [1]

Effectively, the women’s game was key to basketball’s origin story in Lithuania. Cingiene and Laskiene further chronicle how during the country’s first era of independence in the 1920s and 1930s, basketball played several roles:

A means for cultural, technical, and knowledge exchange with Lithuanian diasporas, notably those in the United States who helped inculcate the game (Cingiene and Laskiene note how the first Lithuanian women played a version of the German game, whereas the men started with a U.S.-inflected style).
A way to create a “modern” identity; not only was basketball considered a modern game, but Lithuanian successes in international competition by the late 1930s began to feed national identity
A way to create legitimacy and a sense of belonging by joining the international basketball federation FIBA, competing in sanctioned European competitions, etc.

Do read their article, which details more deeply this important early era, as well as how basketball evolved vis-à-vis Lithuanian identity during the Soviet occupation and since 1990.

In fact, it was the 1992 Olympic bronze medal-winning team that helped resurrect Lithuanian basketball renown on the global stage. The country was reinstated as a full member of the International Olympic Committee and FIBA in time for that summer’s competition, but there was not enough funding initially to enable its players to train and travel for the Games. One of the country’s NBA players, Sarunas Marcioulionis (the first Lithuanian player to hoop in the league), fundraised for the effort, an effort that The Grateful Dead contributed to and helped popularize. In recognition of the effort, the team wore tie-dyed tee-shirts inspired by the famous rock band on the medal podium that summer. The move further put Lithuania on the international popular culture map.

What is important to keep in mind is that basketball for Lithuania is not synonymous with the NBA or WNBA (although they appreciate those high-level championships and the global stage they provide). The country’s game developed throughout large swaths of the twentieth century independently from the U.S. version—similar to how basketball evolved within France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and elsewhere without constant reference to its American cousin.

Several key takeaways for storytelling global basketball:

History matters. Understanding the past helps to explain today—even in sport and especially in basketball.
Honoring international hoops heritages and how they are helping to remake and elevate the game for all should be top-of-mind for any sports content creator.
Doing so can help lead to unexpected, but killer, “that’s interesting…tell me more!” moments. Those are the vital hooks that storytellers use to grab the audience, to gain their attention, to impart messages, and to connect the local to the global.

Moreover, a few sports diplomacy-inflected points rooted from this story:

Basketball Diplomacy aids in nation branding

Basketball Diplomacy aids in developing cultural cachet and relevance via elite wins
It’s about more than nation-branding thanks to game’s multilayered identities and references

I cannot wait to go back and dig more deeply into the basketball side of life. ‘Til next time!

[1] Vilma Cingiene & Skaiste Laskiene (2004) “A Revitalized Dream: Basketball and National Identity in Lithuania,” The International Journal of the History of Sport, 21:5, 762-779, DOI: 10.1080/0952336042000262042