This is the last of six interviews with the Hoop District team captains
Getting to know: Dimitris Kyrsanidis, Team Athens captain
Article
14 Mins read
Today is the day – Hoop District is here! Ahead of the action getting underway in Paris, France, we spoke with Team Athens captain Dimitris Kyrsanidis, who also goes by ‘DK’, to get to know him a little better.
All week long, we have been posting ‘getting to know’ interviews with the Hoop District captains. Here’s what we found out during our conversation with DK.
Tell us about yourself. Who is DK?
“I’m a guy who loves what he is doing. I love sports, and since I was a kid I’ve been trying to do everything perfectly. I’ve been training really hard to achieve my goals. I’ve been playing basketball for three years now – before that, I had never touched a basketball – so I’m really happy to have made it to the point I’m at right now. I’m a five-time parkour world champion and that was my main activity so far, up until I found basketball in the second quarantine. I just fell in love with it! I started training every single day, I’ve been watching videos on how to shoot the ball, how to dribble, how to… everything on YouTube. Then, it instantly became my passion and it changed my life. Again.”
What was the thing that got you into basketball three years ago?
“My wife has a brother who is way younger than me, but he used to play basketball. We first started dating almost four and a half years ago, then three years ago her brother asked me if I wanted to play [basketball] one on one one day. I just went on YouTube and put: ‘How to shoot a basketball’. We played one on one – I didn’t know any rules or anything – and we played up until 30 points. It was 30-2 to me! I liked it so much that during the second quarantine, we went outside together with a couple of friends and we started playing. I just fell in love with it and since then I have beaten people who have played 10-15 years in one on one, then I started playing five on five, which is completely different. But that’s how I started.”
As a five-time parkour world champ, are you always trying to mix skills from parkour with basketball?
“Yes, but not only with basketball. I’ve been doing parkour for 16 years now and since the beginning, I was combining parkour with breakdancing, then I found skateboarding and after some time I could do a flip, land on the board and then do a kickflip, so I was always trying to combine parkour with everything that I was doing. And that’s the magical thing about parkour as well because it’s something you can do anywhere and any time. You don’t need special equipment or any special ground. You can use the environment to your liking, and that’s exactly what I was doing. I think it’s the only sport that you can actually combine with everything there is. For example, I can do it on the floor, I can do it on a bar, I can do it on the street, on a tree… think of something and I can do parkour there, so that’s what attracted me to parkour as well.”
Is there a particular basketball memory that particularly stands out for you?
“Last summer, I went to [Georgios] Printezis’s event. He’s doing an event in his birthplace, Syros, and it’s called AegeanBall Festival. They invited me to play in the celebrity game! I went there and in the first round, we had to play against Printezis’s team – and we won! I scored the last point. In the beginning, we were winning 5-2 or something and Printezis was really chilled. I just kept going, I had really good teammates and we started scoring everything. After that, he started giving his all and they caught up to us. I think we were losing 11-10 and we had 10-15 seconds on the clock, so I scored a three and we went up 12-11, then they lost the ball and we won the game. Every other team was pretty easy to beat, so we won the cup. I never expected something like that to happen, it was crazy.”
Who are your favorite players in the EuroLeague?
“I would say that Mathias Lessort is one of the craziest guys I’ve ever seen. [Mario] Hezonja from Real Madrid is one of the guys I really look up to. When I went to Panathinaikos versus Real, Real beat Panathinaikos pretty easily – it was like a walk in the park at that point – and every single Panathinaikos fan was clapping and congratulating Hezonja. I witnessed that and I was like, ‘No way that’s happening!’ In sports, especially in football, everybody hates the opponent. They start booing, all this sort of stuff, then I witnessed that. I’m not even a Panathinaikos fan and I thought it was crazy. One fan got Hezonja’s jersey and he was showing it to the crowd and I was like, ‘They just lost the game by 20 points, what are they doing?’ But I really respected that. So since then, Hezonja. Overall, Lessort because I met him last year at Printezis’s event and we were actually together in the same team the next day. I told the organization: ‘I want to play with the big names, the A1 guys.’ They told me it would be hard, they didn’t know how they’ll do it, but if I win the celebrity game, they’ll put me in – and that’s when I won. They put me in his team and it was crazy. At the after-party, he even told me that when I come to Athens, we should train together if he has time. Crazy.”
What criteria did you look for when picking your team?
“For the girls, I just wanted to have girls in the team because we had so many difficulties in finding girls, unfortunately. For example, if we go to the park right now, I will easily find some guys. But girls, you won’t see any there, so it was really hard. The girls that I found are from teammates or past teammates because it was really hard. From the boys’ perspective, it was a friend of mine who I’ve been playing with since the beginning. He’s in charge of putting me into games and teams and stuff so I can gain experience, then he told me to try this guy and since then we’ve been playing together. He’s a really cool guy. He’s a guy who shoots threes – that’s what I was looking for and that’s the answer.”
What does it mean for you to be a Team Captain?
“I never expected something like this to happen, you know? I have mixed feelings because I feel great on the one hand, but at the same time I know I’m the guy who is the least experienced compared to the others. I feel great, but at the same time I feel weird because I don’t want to mess things up.”