President of the Georgetown Amateur Basketball Asso-ciation (GABA), Chris Bowman said that the recently-concluded GABA super league tournament was handicapped by the growing level of indiscipline in the sport, lack of sponsorship and poor officiating.
Bowman in an exclusive interview with Stabroek Sport said that the level of indiscipline in local basketball wascause for concern. He said that the tournament failed to attract sponsorship because of the attitude of players.
“One of the things that came out of the league is the growing level of indiscipline in the game. We dealt with every case that came to us, not to everybody’s satisfaction but the lesson is that you are not going to be allowed to get away with that sort of behaviour,” Bowman said.
In one of the notable instances of indiscipline a fight broke out during a game between Pepsi Sonics and Ravens.
The Georgetown association was forced to issue a four-game ban on key players from both teams.
Bowman said that the tournament struggled to come off as it was originally planned. In many of the games there was an obvious decline in the spectator turnout. Sometimes the games merely attracted a maximum of 20 people.
“What happened was that the association struggled to get the tournament off, we did not have any sponsor willing to come on board. I don’t care what sport it is, once you don’t have sponsorship you will struggle,” he observed.
Coupled with the players’ indiscipline, Bowman indicated that the Georgetown clubs’ failure to adhere to the association’s new financial structure and the poor level of officiating were also factors that caused the GABA super league to struggle.
According to the GABA president all the clubs received a quantity of tickets for sale but all came up short with the exception of Ravens and Bounty Colts. He said that the clubs would have benefited financially from the ticket sales.
“We had a tremendous tournament but no resources to follow through. What made things worse was that the clubs did not follow through with the new programme. With the exception of Ravens and Bounty Colts all the other clubs fell well short.”
“We got a new financial structure that allowed clubs to be involved in ticket sales, which they could have benefited from in a real substantial way. We thought those things would have made clubs more financially viable,” Bowman added.
A “frightening” situation also arose where, according to Bowman, the GABA couldn’t find three quality referees for an elite panel for the tournament. As a result games were blown improperly.
“We tried to reform this aspect of the sport by putting together an elite panel that consists of the top three referees.
The problem with this working was that they are simply not enough available referees who can blow a proper game,” the GABA president said.
The alternative for GABA was to go with the referees who are available since that is the only way the tournament could have been staged. “The few that we have, don’t care how bad they are, if we want to have basketball played we have to go with them.”
Bowman made it clear that the idea of the super league was to change the conduct of players on the court, the state of officiating and the source of motivation from playing for money to playing for pride.
He said that the initial concept of the tournament made the Georgetown association very excited. Other than the factors that marred the tournament, Bowman described the league as “great” and “highly competitive”.
“The super league tournament was great for us. It allowed us to engage all the clubs in a highly competitive basketball season. Because of that we can easily say who are the best clubs in George-town,” Bowman asserted.
The Georgetown Basket-ball Association president told Stabroek Sport that the super league will be an annual feature on the GABA calendar and hopefully by the next league this year-end, the association would have cleared the hurdles.