Basketball back on the horizon

THE Raiwaqa Basketball Players Association will kick-off their new season next week.

After a successful season, which ended last April, the fledging association is looking ahead to another tough and competitive year.

RBPA official Mala Ravai confirmed they will start competition next Saturday.

Ravai said there had been a lot of interest shown by clubs wanting to join their competition but at the moment only 16 teams had confirmed participation.

"We will have seven weeks of round-robin competition but at the same time we will organise tournaments and challenge matches," Ravai said. "We also want to introduce an inter-confederacy competition where players from various clubs, who
belong to the same confederacy, come together and form a team.

"We had organised an inter-confederacy tournament once during the inter-lane competition and now we'll be making it an annual event."

Ravai said they were also looking at hosting an open fitness five tournament to run along with the normal club knockout tournaments.

"This phase will totally be different as we will not only be concentrating on weekly competition and tournaments but focus on our kids through
development programs," he said.

"On that note we are thankful to Basketball Fiji officers Lai Puamau and Mark for their great assistance in running programs at Ed's Court during the first week of the school holidays. This is a big boost for us."

Ravai said it's critical that we do this and who knows one day they'll be running the association and development programs.

For the past weeks, the Raiwaqa Basketball Players Association has been keeping themselves busy through community work.

These include the maintenance of the Raiwaqa Health Centre, repairs at Ed's Court and works around the area.

"Our vision is to maintain the reputation of Basketball Fiji's success and become a model for associations of similar size throughout Fiji and our
mission is to promote basketball by providing an excellent level of development and competition for all players in Raiwaqa and beyond."

By JO MAKABA

 THE FIJI TIMES ONLINE





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