Twenty seven years ago, Tom Hovasse arrived in Japan to play basketball. He would go on to become a star in the top Japanese league, but he never envisioned how his life would turn out.
Now, Hovasse is the boss of the country’s women’s basketball national team. The 50-year-old became the head coach for the “Akatsuki Five” earlier this month, becoming the first non-Japanese to take the helm.
"No, not at all," Hovasse said, when asked if he could have imagined he would end up in his current job when he first began playing for the Toyota Motors team (the predecessor of the current Alvark Tokyo of the B. League) in Japan's semi-pro circuit in 1990, following a practice for his provisional national team at Tokyo's National Training Center on Monday.