All tour­na­ments planned for this year by the Caribbean Bas­ket­ball Con­fed­er­a­tion (CBC) have been blown off un­til 2021. Pres­i­dent of CBC, Glyne Clarke, said that the In­ter­na­tion­al Bas­ket­ball Fed­er­a­tion (FI­BA) has man­dat­ed that all cham­pi­onships this year in­clud­ing those host­ed by the CBC be sus­pend­ed.

Clarke ex­plained that go­ing for­ward they would mon­i­tor close­ly what is hap­pen­ing around the world be­cause even though they are plan­ning to have those tour­na­ments played some­time next year, there were no guar­an­tees that the host coun­tries would be ready.

"We will be mon­i­tor­ing to see how the world is re­cov­er­ing and it is sub­ject to the gov­ern­men­tal re­stric­tions this will have on coun­tries. Even though we may restart, some coun­tries might not be in a po­si­tion to start as well.

"We are ac­tu­al­ly in the process of send­ing out some com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the mem­ber coun­tries, not on­ly to check on their state of readi­ness but in terms of be­ing able to play and what the gov­ern­ment re­stric­tions are.

"In terms of fi­nanc­ing, as you know many of the Caribbean coun­tries de­pend heav­i­ly on as­sis­tance from the gov­ern­ment in their com­pe­ti­tions. So it is how well they are able to re­cov­er and to get the fund­ing both gov­ern­men­tal and cor­po­rate to help the teams to com­pete," he said.

Dur­ing a re­cent meet­ing, Clarke not­ed that the CBC man­age­ment had de­cid­ed to use this time to do some on­line train­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly for the coach­es.

"We have al­ready start­ed from the Amer­i­c­as do­ing some vir­tu­al pro­grammes like Zoom and so on with coach­ing at dif­fer­ent lev­els. But what we are go­ing to be do­ing too at the Caribbean lev­el is work­ing on de­vel­op­ing our mi­ni-league coach­es and the mi­ni-league pro­grammes, and al­so do­ing some train­ing for the ref­er­ees and ta­ble of­fi­cials.

"We are cap­i­tal­is­ing on the down­time to make sure peo­ple get the train­ing and in many ar­eas now peo­ple are more re­cep­tive now to do­ing train­ing on­line than be­fore. This al­so saves some cost as well," he said.

Clarke who is al­so chair­man for the FI­BA Amer­i­c­as Com­pe­ti­tions Com­mis­sion not­ed that among the events called off this year were the women's cham­pi­onship which is a qual­i­fi­er for the FI­BA Women's Amer­iCup, the Un­der-15, 17 and 18 Cen­tral Bas­kets for ju­nior boys and girls. Then there is the FI­BA 2023 Caribbean qual­i­fi­er.

Every year CBC, a sub-sub-zone of the In­ter­na­tion­al Bas­ket­ball Fed­er­a­tion (FI­BA), has a packed sched­ule. Clarke ex­plained that each year there were dif­fer­ent qual­i­fy­ing cham­pi­onships with­in the zone.

Ac­cord­ing to the CBC pres­i­dent, one of the chal­lenges they are usu­al­ly faced with was host­ing ju­nior and se­nior cham­pi­onships in the same year. He al­so said it was de­pen­dent on the coun­try's abil­i­ty to par­tic­i­pate.

"We've had lots of chal­lenges es­pe­cial­ly in the ju­nior cat­e­go­ry. The last ju­nior cham­pi­onship we had was an un­der-18 in Guyana back in 2016. So the chal­lenge is when you have a ju­nior cham­pi­onship like an Un­der-16, 18 in the same year as a se­nior cham­pi­onship.

"That's the chal­lenge we are hav­ing, we have lots of coun­tries who are in­ter­est­ed in com­pet­ing in the se­nior cham­pi­onship, the Women's Caribbean Cup and the men's pre-qual­i­fiers. The chal­lenge is get­ting teams to play both. We find that in many cas­es when it comes to se­nior cham­pi­onships that a lot of coun­tries opt to play in the se­nior cham­pi­onship and leave out the ju­nior cham­pi­onship. So it is al­ways a chal­lenge when we have to host two cham­pi­onships in a year," he said.

To avoid such a chal­lenge, Clarke ex­plained that when CBC sends out its bid to host, they ask coun­tries to host both males and fe­males.

"When we give peo­ple the op­por­tu­ni­ty they choose to host the men. The men are more com­pet­i­tive, they draw big­ger crowds and are bet­ter able to man­age the cham­pi­onship be­cause they would get the re­ceipts from the men's cham­pi­onship. We found that over the years in the women's cham­pi­onship, the spec­ta­tor­ship is not as big as the men's," he said.

(Cour­tesy of: bar­ba­dos­to­day.bb)