Italian basketball received a boost last summer when their U16 side guaranteed promotion to the Division A of the Termosteps U16 European Championship Women.

This year's Italian U16 side is entirely new, but by securing a spot in the Katowice semi-finals the leaders of this team hope to give a different kind of boost - hope.

"When you start to win something you start to believe that whatyou do can work. We hope that our work can be built upon. If you never win you start to feel your work is use-less because there is no hope. We hope that we can give hope to national women's basketball," said Umberto Alliori, who is co-coach with Giovanni Lucchesi of the Italian side in Poland.

Lucchesi was clear in describing what it meant for him that Italy booked their first U16 semi-final appearance since 1995 after cliching their fifth consecutive victory to start the tournament - "It's a dream for us."

The coaches said the difference for this summer's side is something they called a "new mentality".

"A new mentality because in our history Italy usually goes down in mentality and concentration and determination game after game. But this team really likes to work, and we are growing after every game," said Lucchesi.

When asked where the new mentality comes from, both coaches came up with different answers.

"We try to speak to the team as a senior team - not like a young team. We treat them like a senior team because we want to help them to grow," said Lucchesi.

While Alliori offered: "From the first day of preparations we asked the players to always have the mentality that we are a good team. And now we ask the players to demonstrate game after game what we can do and to let people talk about us."

And there is plenty to talk about with this Italian team, which beat Russia 54-50 to clinch their spot in the semi-finals. On offense, Italy rank fifth-best in field goal percentage at 39 percent and fourth-fewest in turnovers committed with 18.4. And they are playing tough defense, holding their opponents to a second-lowest shooting percentage of 29.7 percent while allowing a third-fewest 52.6 points per game.

While some may think this is a typical example of tough defense leading to a solid offense, Lucchesi and Alliori feel they are bucking that idea.

"Usually people think from a great defense will come a great offense. We try to convince our players that a good defense can come from a great offense. This is a little bit different. But we couldn't stay in Division A by scoring 38 points per game. We needed to improvise, to run, to play one-on-one and be more free mentally," said Alliori.

Lucchesi added: "We just read the defense. We are not very rigid. We want to see what the defense gives us. What are they doing: man, zone, press, match-up defense? And concentrate on offense, offense, offense. That gives us more intensity and rhythm. It's strange but our defense is the result of our work on offense. Against Russia we tried to zone press in the last minute and we had two steals and got good shots off that. So it is working."

It has worked very well so far, even though this Italy team is playing well above the expectations of many back home coming to Katowice.

"Everybody in Italy was expecting us just to stay in Division A. This was our target. And we worked to be a team that was ready to play in Division A. The results have been much better than anybody else expected. But our team was prepared and we said: 'Let's go there and try to do our job.' And we have tried to be our best every day," said Alliori.

After five games, Italy were better than their opponents every day, giving hope for the future.