> SOUTHERN INDIANA — Perry Hunter is making the most out of his first trip on an airplane.

The Henryville High School boys’ basketball coach will make his maiden voyage into the air on Sunday.

But this won’t be a typical getaway trip with the family.

Hunter will be headed to Serbia and Macedonia, where he will spend two weeks working basketball camps.

“It’s a pretty unique opportunity,” said Hunter, who says his first experience on a jet will be a flight from Louisville to Newark, N.J., before connecting to his flight across the Atlantic. “Having never been on a plane before, I probably could have picked a shorter flight to start out on.

“There’s going to be some nerves for sure, but I’m really looking forward to it.”

The story of how Hunter’s Eurotour came about was just as unique.

Hunter started using the social networking site Twitter last year and noticed on of his followers was listed as Kane Stasde — a coach in the former Yugoslavian country of Macedonia.

“I just sent him a message saying he’s a long way from Indiana and asked how he found me,” Hunter said. “We just had a few back and forth exchanges after that and got to know each other pretty well.”

The Euro coach told Hunter that another friend of his was coaching a player from Indiana in a professional league in Iceland.

The player turned out to be former South Central High School star Craig Schoen, who tormented Henryville and the rest of the Southern Athletic Conference as a high school player in the early part of this decade.

“He said there was a player from Indiana over there and I figured I had to know who it was,” Hunter said. “It turns out being a guy who we’re all very familiar with in the area.”

Hunter’s tour of camps will begin in Zlatibor, Serbia — located 230 kilometers from the capital city of Belgrade — where he will be a counselor at one of the countries most prestigious high-profile camps.

He will spend his second week in Lake Ohrid — a body of water bordering Macedonia and Algeria — and work in one of Macedonia’s top junior camps.

“For me, the experience is more a thing of fellowship,” Hunter said. “It’s about being around a collection of people that know and love basketball.

“I don’t know what to expect I will learn there personally. I’ve already learned that the reason you see so many European players with great footwork is because they play soccer and we’ve tried to implement some principles of soccer into our pre-practice workouts.”

Room and board for Hunter is being covered while he is on his trip. He provided his own airfare.

“The whole trip is going to cost me a fraction of what it would cost for someone to fly there and spend two weeks. That’s what made it too difficult to turn down.”

Hunter said the only downside is the two weeks that he’ll be away from his wife, Kristie, and two children.

“It was the only thing that made me think twice about it,” he said. “Ideally, you get to do these type of things with your family members, but they’ll be staying behind this time.

“As soon as I told my wife I had been invited she just said, ‘you have to do it, you may never get the chance to again.’ She didn’t hesitate. Her being so supportive made the decision even easier.”

Hunter said despite the six-hour time difference, he hopes that he’ll be able to chat with his family daily.

“I’m hoping I’ll be able to set up a computer and talk daily online.”



HUNTER ON SOCIAL NETWORKING

Perry Hunter is one of the most outspoken coaches on the benefits of social networking tools.

Not only was his upcoming trip to Europe largely a byproduct of meeting overseas coaches on Twitter, he also says that the networking site has opened new doors for his program close to home.

“I’ve found that college coaches are much more likely to respond to you via Twitter than any e-mail you may send,” Hunter said. “I met (Olney Central College head coach) Mike Burris exclusively on Twitter, and now we’re spending the week here as a team at a shootout event.”

With a lot of the sites being so new and not a lot of people completely behind them, you find sort of a small community of coaches that are interacting and learning about one-another,” Hunter said.