Other events in Baltic States

Latvian basketball vice-champions "ASK Riga" will now be coached by Lithuanian Donaldas Kairys, who was assistant to the team's now former Coach Ramunas Butautas, as several Lithuanian Internet portals reported over the weekend, writes LETA.

As reported, the club has fallen on hard times and three foreign players – Corey Brewer, Ricardo Marsh and Milutin Aleksic – have departed as a result. On Saturday, the head coach of Lithuanian national basketball team Butautas also quit his position.

Along with Butautas, Lithuanian physical fitness coach Virginijus Mikalauskas will leave the Rigans' team.

Lithuanian portal "krepsinis.net" reports that in near future three more players could abandon the club – Uvis Helmanis, Bruno Sundovs and captain Sandis Valters.

Official confirmation of the above-mentioned information is expected at the "ASK Riga" press conference at 2 p.m. today.

As reported, "ASK Riga's" three main sponsors were Parex Bank, the Riga City Council and the Defense Ministry. The ministry has already announced it is yanking its funding in 2009 and the Riga City Council announced that it will significantly trim sponsorship of all sports-related activities. Parex Bank has not released any announcement yet on this matter, but sources close to the ailing bank indicate that it will be unable to continue allocating previous amounts, as the newspaper Dienas Bizness reported last week.

In 2004, Kairys was the manager of Lithuanian national students' basketball team, but since 2007 he has been working as assistant to Butautas, coaching Lithuanian national men's basketball team.

In his career, the 31-year-old Kairys has worked for such teams as Missouri University team, NBA club San Antonio "Spurs", Moscow Region team "Khimki", Vilnius "Lietuvos rytas", Lithuanian second strongest division club "Silute", as well as for the Moscow CSKA.