The Golden State Warriors will be taking their talents to Brigham Young University-Hawaii.
The NBA team will start its preseason with a training camp held at BYU-Hawaii, NBC Sports’ Monte Pool reported on Monday.
The team will fly to Hawaii after media day on Sept. 30 and then practice on the campus from Oct. 1-4.
“(Head coach Steve) Kerr and the members of front office all believe this four-day getaway at BYU-Hawaii on the pastoral north shore of Oahu will promote healthy bonding, with all parties benefitting,” Poole wrote.
Steph Curry’s relationship with BYU-Hawaii
The BYU-Hawaii campus and Cannon Activities Center will be familiar to at least one member of the Warriors organization: Steph Curry.
Curry hosted a basketball camp at BYU-Hawaii in the summer of 2016, according to the university. Roughly 200 boys and girls attended the camp to learn from Curry and the Warriors youth basketball staff.
For three of the four days, Curry was in attendance, signing autographs, taking photos with campers and sharing his workout routine and experiences from his NBA journey.
During one of those days, Curry surprised campers by knocking on their dorm doors and pretending to be a pizza delivery guy. One young fan even fainted when he opened the door and saw Curry, which was captured in a video shared by Hawaii News Now’s Stephanie Lum on Facebook.
“To be able to bring it here to Hawaii, to see our supporters down here, they get to watch all of our games with the time difference and all that … so to be able to come down and share and kind of embrace Dub Nation here in Hawaii, I think it’s a really good experience. I know there’s a lot of kids here. I think there’s about 90 kids from Hawaii. I don’t know if they get that opportunity elsewhere. So I think it’s a pretty cool experience for the campers, for their parents to just enjoy the game of basketball,” Curry said, per Lum.
Has an NBA team practiced at BYU-Hawaii before?
This will not be the first time BYU-Hawaii has hosted an NBA training camp.
Last year, the Utah Jazz held their training camp at the university. It was the team’s first preseason appearance in Hawaii since 2015 when they played two preseason games at the University of Hawaii’s Stan Sheriff Center and only their third preseason trip in the state since 1993, according to the NBA.
The practices were closed to the public, but the team invited fans to one post-practice scrimmage.
“Being up here on the North Shore at BYU Hawaii, they’ve been really, really great to let us into their space and they’ve been unbelievably hospitable,” Jazz head coach Will Hardy said last year, as the Deseret News previously reported.
He continued, “We wanted to make sure that we returned the favor, show them a little bit of love. … It always gives a little bit different energy to the to the gym when there’s fans. So to let them in at the end of practice, watch the scrimmage, it gave our guys a much needed boost on the third day.”