Hemofarm Vrsac
From Hoopedia
Hemofarm Vrsac is a professional basketball club in Vrsac, Serbia, which sponsors men's and women's teams.
Just a few years ago, Vrsac, one of the oldest towns in Serbia, was more famous for its women's basketball team. Also called Hemofarm, the women were national club champions in Yugoslavia from 1998 to 2000. But fans in Vrsac were not wholly satisfied. They lived for the chance to see the men's team of Hemofarm playing among Europe's best. That dream has come true this season: Hemofarm has not only debuted in the ULEB Cup, but is the only team representing Serbia and Montenegro in the elimination rounds. But Hemofarm is no basketball newcomer. The club was founded in 1946, when basketball in the former Yugoslavia was still in diapers, and Jedinstvo from Vrsac is among the oldest basketball teams in the region. It was a small team from a small town situated in the Pannonian Valley, where the tallest sights were the roofs of churches and the heads of basketball players.
The top players were local attractions, but competing in minor leagues for years, were not known far beyond Vrsac. Basketball enthusiasts from Vrsac looked for sponsors early, because they understood even then that a basketball boom was coming. So the club called Jedinstvo would exist under different names of sponsors after that. In 1959, its name was changed to Mladost, eight years later to Inex Brixol,a chemical manufacturer. Starting in 1968, it was named after an agricultural company, Agropanonija. That same year, Yugoslavia won its first Olympic medal, silver medal in Mexico. With boys playing basketball now in the streets and schoolyards of the region's biggest cities - Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Sarajevo and Split - little Vrsac got lost in the basketball map for years. Until 1981, just making the Yugoslav third division was a battle. Starting then, under the banner of a new sponsor, Inex Vrsac started a long climb by winning the Vojvodina district and reentering the third division in 1987. Two years later, in the 1989-90 season, Inex Vrsac moved up to the second division.
A crucial moment came in 1992 when sponsorship of the male and female teams was taken over by Hemofarm Group, one of the largest pharmaceutical producers in the country. Under the Hemofarm name, the club was still competing in the second division in 1996-97, but a year later ranked first there and it was promoted to play in the first division against such giants as Partizan Belgrade, Red Star Belgrade and Buducnost. Hemofarm ranked 10th in the league that first season and reached the quarter-finals of the national cup. Besides the enthusiasm of the locals, two names were most responsible for the success: Miodrag Babic, still chairman of the club's assembly, and head coach Zeljko Lukajic. Babic is also chairman of Hemofarm, the pharmaceuticals giant, but first of all he is a man who loves basketball and was one of the main figures in the Yugoslav Basketball Association during the last 20 golden years. Lukajic took over the team in 1998 after having coached Partizan and PAOK of Greece before.
In the final years of the millenium Lukajic was building the team and Babic was building the sports arena called Millenium in Vrsac. Both succeeded. Lukajic led the team to fourth place in the 1999-00 season, this securing its participation in the Korac Cup. The next year, Hemofarm was sixth in the league and reached the semifinals. Playing again in the Korac Cup, the team from Vrsac reached the semifinals in 2001-02. Petar Popovic, who became a center on the national team at the 2004 Olympics, Stevan Pekovic, Andrija Ciric, now with Prokom Trefl Sopot of Poland, Djordje Djogo, Dragoljub Vidacic and incredible veteran Marko Ivanovic, who was 40, lost the opener of the two-game finals in Vrsac, by 69-71 to Unicaja, and dropped the second on the road by 30 points.
A year later in Vrsac, the Millenium Arena was inaugurated, a unique example of sports-business project organized as a joint-stock company. The arena's capacity for sporting events is 3,600 seats including the VIP and state box. Full of high-level technical equipment, Millenium has its own TV and fitness studio. The six-story tower covers 11,800 square meters. Hemofarm finally got a home to call its own and at the same time, a new project was born. His name was Darko Milicic, a 2.17-meter left-hander who became a star when he was 17 years old. In 2002-03, Hemofarm was a hit on the basketball scene of Serbia and Montenegro, with an arena that Partizan and Red Star dreamed about and a young star in Milicic that most NBA teams were dreaming about. That's not to mention sharpshooter Nebojsa Bogavac, who reached the national team at Euro 2003, dominant big man Petar Popovic and veteran Milenko Topic, who had played for years in the national team wining medals and in the Euroleague. Hemofarm finished fifth in its domestic league that year and fourth at the FIBA Champions Cup Final Four.
The whole basketball world came to know the name Hemofarm as Milicic was taken second at the 2003 NBA draft, higher than any European player ever, by the Detroit Pistons, who went on to capture NBA title in his rookie year. Hemofarm moved on without Milicic, but under new coach Aco Petrovic, to reach the Serbia and Montenegro playoff semifinals last season, surprising Red Star to reach its first-ever domestic playoff finals. Although Partizan won that series, it needed the help of a buzzer-beater to avoid a fifth game with Hemofarm. For its first ULEB Cup competition, Hemofarm prepared last summer by retaining key players like Bogavac, Popovic, Topic, Savo Djikanovic, Sasa Vasiljevic and Vladimir Tica while adding Jasmin Hukic and Vonteego Cummings. Lukajic returned to take over the bench from Petrovic during the 2004-05 season and he brought back his well-known energy with which to secure Hemofarm hard-won place on the basketball map of Europe.
