Maccabi Ironi Ramat Gan have brought in one of European 3x3 basketball's best-known shooting coaches to work inside their development system. ONE reports that Angelo Tsagarakis, the 42-year-old French-Greek former player, has signed on as the club's player development director for the next two years.
Tsagarakis's brief is broad: he will oversee shooting mechanics and individual offensive skill work across every age group at the club, from the youth ranks up to the senior roster, with a particular emphasis on first-step quickness and one-on-one scoring ability.
He arrives into a structure built around Pini Gershon, the veteran Israeli coach who returned to Ramat Gan as professional director after more than three decades away, and he is expected to coordinate closely with the club's long-serving youth department head. According to ONE, Tsagarakis is due to relocate to Israel with his family in early September, ahead of the new season.
Club chairman Chen Sneiderman made clear how much the club wanted this hire. "Bringing Angelo to Maccabi Ironi Ramat Gan was our main goal for the upcoming season, and I'm happy to announce to every player at the club that we've done it," he said, according to ONE.
The appointment is not a cold introduction. Tsagarakis already has a relationship with the Ramat Gan club, having previously travelled to Israel as a guest of Gershon to run shooting and skills clinics for its youth teams, and having worked with some of those same players remotely in the past. This deal formalises that connection into a full-time, contracted role.
On the court, Tsagarakis built his reputation in 3x3 basketball rather than the traditional five-a-side game, after a playing career that ran from 2008 to 2019 across French clubs including JL Bourg-en-Bresse and Paris-Levallois, and Greek sides such as Aries Trikala and Ionikos Nikaias.
It was with France's national 3x3 team that he became a recognisable figure in the discipline, helping the side to a bronze medal at the 2017 FIBA 3x3 World Cup in Nantes. In the individual long-range shooting contests held alongside that tournament and the following year's European Championship in Bucharest, he took the top prize both times, cementing his reputation as one of the format's premier marksmen.
For Ramat Gan, a club with a large youth base and ambitions to keep producing players who can push into the senior team, landing a coach with that specific shooting pedigree is being pitched as a statement of intent rather than a marginal addition to the staff.
