• Basketball Review: Politics tarnish 2008 performance: New GABA Executive off to impressive start
  • By Edison Jefford | January 1, 2009

    Politics, infighting and inactivity took an unprecedented toll on local basketball this year as the Guyana Amateur Basketball Federation (GABF) slumped to new levels of underperformance and irrelevance.
    The GABF has been reduced to mere formality and has not organised a single tournament this year after banking on the appearance of the Washington DC Jammers that cancelled its annual tour to Guyana earlier this year.
    As a result, a national male team was not identified and the GABF could not supplement the absence of the DC Jammers with another initiative. The message was clear: no D.C Jammers, no national team competition.
    Despite complaints of lack of sponsorship at the federation level, a move to identify and encamp select players with a view of further exposure would not have been a negative development after Jammers’ disappointment.
    The GABF did little or nothing to advance local basketball in 2008 and that is a direct consequence of a poorly structured federation that does not have identifiable Executives, who clearly has the sport’s interest at heart.
    In other words, no work is being done and if work is in progress then clearly the result is microscopic, which means that the federation has to change its approach or the officials responsible for specific functions.
    The excuse that functioning sub–associations make a functioning federation cannot stand up to scrutiny. The GABF has particular responsibilities whether or not its subsidiaries are performing to an appropriate standard.
    For instance, a presiding federation should ensure that Guyana is consistently represented at the Caribbean Basketball Confederation (CBC) Championships and that a national male and female team is always prepared.
    That can only happen if the GABF recognises the need for a ‘National League’ where the corporate community is directly linked to the sport and athletes are equally rewarded for their commitment and effort on the court.
    Guyana has six towns but only two of them–Georgetown and Linden–have functioning sub–associations. That is an area that the GABF could seriously address since a national team represents all of Guyana and not two towns.
    Apart from the institutionalisation of associations in the other towns, which would give a clear indication of the depth of talent in the nation, the federation has to address the issue of national record keeping and selection.
    When a player is selected to represent Guyana that player should have the dispensation of knowing that their selection was based on performance but that can only happen with a functional statistical committee.
    The issue of exposure of officials to international training is another bugbear; the distance between our officials and those internationally is so yawning that it left a referee at a game Saturday night without tires to drive home.
    Someone felt that the referee’s judgment on the court was not accurate and decided that the best course of action is to puncture all four tires of the referees’ bus. Incidences like these could be avoided with proper training.
    There is so much work to be done at the federation level that even the initiation of even a microcosmic task would have been commended but to not do anything when there are lots to be done speaks of gross underperformance.
    And this is in light of grandiose rhetoric at the beginning of the year where GABF President, Godwin McPherson and Robert Cadogan promised an improvement, especially in the department of local competitions.
    Politics
    After the failure of the Inter–Guiana Games, which would have given Government kudos in the sport, the reputation of the State’s minor input into the internationally played sport continued its obvious proliferation.
    The GABF should have an enduring relationship with the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport but that is undeniably not the case. There is enough evidence to support the fracture in the two entities stale relationship.
    One that prominently comes to the fore is the way the Ministry went about selecting the national junior basketball team for the Inter–Guiana Games. The GABF did not play a single role at any level in that process.
    The GABF is nationally responsible for basketball and even if it was at the consultancy level, the Ministry should have gotten the federation involved. Instead, they went about the processes independent of the federation.
    It is not in the best interest of the Ministry to send messages that seem to indicate that the intention is to make the GABF obsolete. There is no replacement for a unified approach to sports especially when success is the objective.
    While the federation and the Ministry continued to ignore each other, a decisive Annual General Meeting (AGM) loomed as former Georgetown Amateur Basketball Association (GABA) President, Chris Bowman lost support.
    Georgetown clubs had begun to complain about the GABA’s inactivity and the need for a more collective approach to the sport. A motion of no–confidence secretly circulated but that failed to attract enough support. The pressure finally took its toll on Bowman, who announced the week before the AGM that he would not be seeking re–election. A year before he had threatened to give up the post to go on a sabbatical aimed at priesthood.
    Clearly, Bowman did not display the kind of vision and decisiveness that was needed to dig the sport out of the doldrums. Yet the Ministry rewarded him with honour to select and train Guyana’s national junior basketball team.
    In fact, the players for the junior national team were hand–picked from Bowman’s high school tournament and not a national junior high school competition, which would have given a true reflection of the depth of players.
    Politics and the proliferation of the sport
    Add those issues with Bowman up and you will get a GABA that was divided and mostly unilateral under his stewardship. He did not seek re–election in September, a decision that brought Trevor Rose to power.
    The dissatisfaction with the performance of basketball Executives, however, was not only confined to the Capital City. The Linden Amateur Basketball Association (LABA) also had its share of internal ramblings.
    After Uborn Smith took over from Colin Aaron last year, many pundits felt that the sport in the Mining Town of Linden had taken a major step forward but that backfired when Smith was immensely criticised in September.
    Officials from the LABA Executive felt that Smith had not delivered on the promise that brought him to power. As a result, an unconstitutional no–confidence motion was put to a vote but Smith emerged winner.
    Smith came under fire because of his inability to attract sponsorship, hands–off approach to management and blatant absence from basketball related activities in Linden. He was excessively in the background of the sport.
    Comparatively, the GABA under new President, Rose has accomplished much more than the LABA in three months. The LABA under new President, Smith have struggled to get 75 percent of their goals off the ground.
    A ‘last–quarter programme’ followed Rose when he came to office in Georgetown. Amid the plans were an Interactive ‘getting to know’ Session, Resuscitation of Burnham Court, Basketball Retreat, Division I and Division III League.
    So far, the GABA has accomplished all those objectives and is currently staging the first and third divisions League simultaneously on the Burnham Court. The same cannot be said of the Smith administration in Linden.
    When Smith won the support of clubs to become the next LABA President, a number of development plans for facilities across Linden were outlined, in addition to the consistent proliferation of the Sport in the savvy town. However, no infrastructural work has commenced on basketball facilities across Linden even the renowned Mackenzie Sports Club hard–court despite a prior disclosure that the association had received material for the works.
    In addition, the LABA cannot boast of successfully pulling off many of the tournaments that were sketched in an itinerary that Kaieteur Sport had seen. The complaint is the lack of sponsorship returns for the events. The Brucshe’s Classic, while the LABA sanctioned the competition, cannot be measured as a LABA brainchild because it came from private promotion. The distinction between sanctioning, ownership and management is clear.
    Another LABA–sanctioned Basketball Festival in August is yet to be completed and the association is currently staging a Pioneer Construction Senior Club League, which when added up accounts for the 25 percent of success.
    However, despite their troubles, the LABA was still able to put together a representative composition that embarrassed the Georgetown team in the senior male game of the 2008 Supligen All–Star event in October. With all things considered, it was not a very good year for local basketball but the adage that suggests that ‘before there is a high there is a low’ could prove true if at the end of 2009 this review beams with congratulations.
    A renaissance in the sport next year requires work– work at Government, federation, sub–association and club levels. Work is never isolated and requires cooperation. Hopefully this is the year of enlightenment for basketball.