Obituary: Alex Gulam, Cavalry Park Sports Club founder, 60

Tributes have been paid to Alex Gulam, the founder member of Edinburgh's Cavalry Park Sports Club (CPSC) and a respected basketball coach, who died earlier this year, aged 60.

Born in Edinburgh in 1949, Mr Gulam had a natural advantage for basketball from birth, as he held the record for being the tallest baby born at Simpson Memorial Hospital.

Despite this, he only grew to 5ft 6ins and regularly found himself surrounded by giants during his later playing days.

He took up the sport at the age of 12 and went on to coach several successful teams, producing many top players, before emigrating to the Netherlands where he continued to coach.

Mr Gulam grew up in the Canongate in Edinburgh and was educated at St Anthony's Secondary School. He began his basketball career at the Pleasance Boys Club.

He was invited to play for the Ants by George Brough, who was one of his teachers at St Anthony's, and he was there until the new Calvary Park School was opened.

Mr Gulam moved with Brough and started the CPSC basketball team.

He met his wife Lyn in the Blue Blanket bar in the Canongate on 23 June, 1968 and they married four years later in November 1972 at St Andrew's Church, Clermiston.

In 1979, the couple emigrated to the Netherlands, where Lyn's sister had moved after marrying a Dutch man.

He took on various jobs, including one in a bomb factory, before becoming an area manager for a cleaning company, which he held for more than 17 years before ill health forced him to retire.

While coaching in various European basketball tournaments with CPSC he met Eric Kroft, the coach of the Dutch Wilskracht basketball team. Kroft offered him a job as assistant coach with Wilskracht, and he was later offered a coaching job with Heerhugowaard basketball team, north of Amsterdam.

He kept an old yellow and blue CPSC strip in a drawer and said his time with the club was the best years of his life.

Remembered as a "dedicated and inspirational" coach at the club, he had a great influence in developing talent including internationalists such as Dave McKenzie, Ken Graham, Derek Frame, Willie Davitt and the late Martin Ramage.

"He was my first real coach," said Dave McKenzie, who represented Scotland in the 1978 Commonwealth Championship aged 18.

"He was the main driver of the club and he certainly had us firing on all cylinders."

Basketballscotland board member Gordon Berry, another player to benefit under Mr Gulam's tutelage, said: "During Alex's years at Cavalry Park he made the club the unofficial junior champions of Britain at that time as they beat all the best English sides.

"Indeed, it was a tribute to the work he was doing that top English side Crystal Palace used to take their junior teams north just to test them out."

Mrs Gulam, who has received condolences from former CPSC boys from all over the world, said: "He was a great friend and very loyal. His commitment to the youths at CPSC was unconditional and the pride he had in them stayed with him until he died."