The first branch of the “Tony Parker Academy” opened in Lyon in 2019, at the very location of ASVEL Lyon-Villeurbanne, the French basketball club chaired by Tony Parker. The second branch will take place in the Paris region, on Île-des-Vannes in Saint-Ouen, in Seine-Saint-Denis from 2024. A project accepted by the municipality on January 19. “It will be a place that will embody the democratization of sporting, educational and cultural excellence”, explained Karim Bouamrane, the mayor of Saint-Ouen.
Live your passion
The “Tony Parker Academy” is a training center, training center and refereeing school. “We are going to train champions, but also citizens because there will be an extremely strong educational added value”, he detailed. Open to young girls and boys from the age of 15, the school of Tony Parker and his childhood friend Gaëtan Muller has one objective: to enable young people to reconcile sport and employment.
This sports project on Île-des-Vannes is the result of a meeting. “We quickly realized, after a few hours of discussion with Tony, that we shared the same republican values, freedom, equality, fraternity, work, humility, generosity”, confides Karim Bouamrane. “This project is the crystallization of all these values.”
The Academy will take place in the Île-des-Vannes sports complex and its Grande Nef Lucien-Belloni, created in 1971 by the architects Pierre Chazanoff and Anatole Kopp. A place that hosted international concerts in the 70s and 80s such as Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd. “The goal is to reconnect with this cultural tradition that has characterized us,” reports the mayor of Saint-Ouen.
The project is part of a new dynamic for the city of Saint-Ouen and will make it possible, in conjunction with the Greater Paris metropolis, the department and the region, to redevelop the banks and footbridges, thus offering a direct link with the rest of the city.