– association’s secretary plays tight defence
By Rawle Toney
The Pepsi Sonics Basketball Club is questioning the Georgetown Amateur Basketball Association’s (GABA) vision for the sport in the city and has slammed GABA’s lack of administrative practices but GABA, playing strong defence, has denied several of the charges made by the club.
In a release sent to Stabroek Sport, the club stated that for basketball to survive in the city or country as a whole there must be a complete adjustment within the administration of the sport.
Contacted for a comment the association’s secretary, Bobby Cadogan said the club needed to get its facts right.
Among the charges of the club is that GABA was merely a group of people with no mandate or vision and that the body was operating without a constitution.
But Cadogan in an invited comment said the club was totally wrong.
“We are in receipt of three constitutions, one from the Chris Douglas-led association and two from the last association that was run by Chris Bowman, so what we are doing right now is having a proper look at the two and have it amended but to say we don’t have one is not true,” said Cadogan.
The club also claimed that the treasurer of GABA was not functioning and that there was no bank account even though one had been passed down from the previous administration and all that was needed was for the account to be activated by taking a letter to the bank verifying who the new executives were.
But Cadogan again refuted those charges.
“This is so not true, the Sonics had a representative on this association, Mr. Joel Loncke and he resigned from the post of treasurer and then Mr. Panday (Vijay) who was assistant secretary treasurer, moved up to his place.”
According to Pepsi Sonics, the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) monitors its revenue collection process just to make sure that the national coffers gets its royalties but the association does not even monitor its 15% of the gross profit from sanctioning fees so as to raise their revenue but rather accepts meagre sums probably due to close associations with organisers.
The club also charged that unlike other sports disciplines such as rugby, cricket, tennis and football there were no coaching seminars held to improve and develop coaches.
Instead, the club said, the GABA seems more interested in the staging of basketball mega events.
As it relates to growth and establishment of its own basketball facility, Pepsi Sonics said that the association needed to register itself as a non-governmental organization so that it could receive preferential benefits under the Act and it should also liaise with other relevant agencies, both governmental and non-governmental where they could submit programmes and gather sponsorship for activities to help develop the sport properly.
“For Pepsi Sonics information, GABA is, even before this new association took over, an NGO. It has been like this for awhile now, but there is so much we have to do with basketball when we took over that it is too much sometimes. But we’re trying. Once again, they need to get their facts in order,” Cadogan pointed out.
“You know, GABA honestly shares and understands the views expressed by the club and acknowledges that they are important. Let’s face the fact here, we are really trying to get basketball back in shape but let’s be real also, two years to do so is little or no time, maybe if we had four years you know but hey, we are trying our best,” Cadogan told Stabroek Sport yesterday.