The Club GM Pavel Astakhov and the Deputy Governor of the Khimki town district Yury Vaulin personally greeted the programme recruits at the Khimki arena and introduced the OT principles and purposes to the public. This season ambassador Ruslan Pateev was also present to welcome the kids to the One Team Khimki family.

BC Khimki has been running its local all-Euroleague CSR programme for three consecutive seasons now. In the seasons 2014/15 and 2015/16 the club held weekly OT sessions for the 12 and 14 year olds at two local secondary schools. The sessions were coached by a BC Khimki professional youth team coach Miron Lebedev and the OT ambassador Vitaly Nosov.

This 2016/17 basketball season our club, in the official partnership with the Administration of the Khimki town, is opening a brand new page in the story of One Team Khimki. This season the efforts of the programme will be dedicated to the local children from large families and those in need of community support.

The weekly sessions will be held both at the Khimki home arena and at one of the local school gyms.

What is an OT session

The sessions include competitive basketball based drills aimed at the development of life skills and moral education of pupils rather than the acquisition of basketball skills per sa. Through these drills, the children learn the benefits of team work, respect toward each other while working on a single goal, the purpose and usefulness of rules both in sport and life. Some drills have a theoretical part aimed at educating the kids on tolerance toward each other irrespective of the differences in personal interests, social or ethnic background, and on the subject of the damage and side-effects from the use of alcohol and drugs among other life skill themes featuring in the programme.

One Team Khimki is a multifaceted social responsibility programme. Our club strives to embrace and support as many vulnerable communities as we can. It is for this reason that Khimki also works with the orphan children, holding the annual charity basketball tournament Chebureada in collaboration with the Children’s Charity Fund Lada for the orphanages of Moscow, Khimki, the towns of the Moscow region, and Nizhny Novgorod. In preparation for the tournament the club holds a series of standard OT sessions at some of the participating orphanages, which is also the plan for the present season.