While their first team start pre-season training next week, several members of the Leopards have been helping Great Britain’s women’s team prepare for the European Championships B Division.

Leopards director of youth basketball, Mark Clark, is the head coach of the national women’s team and he has enlisted the help of the Lloyd Gardner and Duncan Ogilvie as his side prepare for four crucial games.

Gardner, who has stepped up from playing for the Big Cats to become assistant coach this season, is in charge of video analysis and scouting, which will see him traveling around Europe to watch Britain’s future opponents. Forward Ogilvie, who was voted player-of-the-year by the club’s fans last season and is a former England international, is working as the team’s fitness and conditioning coach.

To complete the Leopards’ dominance of most of the senior positions, Leopards’ general manager Dave Ryan is acting as the GB team’s press officer.

“It’s a big boost for the club to have so many people involved in the Great Britain set-up” said Ryan. “Our coach, Jon Burnell, is assistant to the men’s under-20 side and we also had Joe Ikhinmwin in that side, so we are obviously doing something right.”

After six warm-up games – playing Finland, Croatia and Slovenia twice each - Great Britain start their European Championship games on Saturday (Sept 1) when Estonia are the visitors to Manchester’s Amaechi Centre.

They travel to Luxembourg the following Saturday before returning to Manchester of Wednesday September 11 when Bosnia are the visitors. They round off the competition on Saturday September 15 with a trip to Portugal. Having won two of their four games in the first phase of games last season, Britain realistically need to win all four games to finish in the top two of the group and qualify for the promotion play-offs. If Britain can prove to be competitive in Division A, they would expect to be included in the 2012 Olympics in London.

Clark, who took over as coach when the Great Britain programme was revived last summer, is positive about his side’s progress: “We’re still to work out our stating five. We have big options and we have a smaller more mobile option. If everyone’s fit it should go very well. We’ve made a lot of progress, and we’re looking forward to testing ourselves.”