THE captain of the Anse Etoile Stars, Simone Bamboche, is to be commended for her honest and open comment about what is happening with basketball for the ladies. Her team left Seychelles to compete in the Indian Ocean Champions Cup and came home with a bronze medal. Now for some this would have been reward enough but as she explained, when one looks at the way the ladies are progressing in the region very soon Seychelles will find itself not being in a position to defeat even Mayotte.
For a while now, if one watches the ladies basketball in Seychelles we have been seeing the same faces for more than a decade. Now it is important for teams to have experienced players but when teams are unable to recruit young players sooner or later the team will close down. If we look at the ladies competition while some sports like handball and netball have enough teams for two divisions, in basketball basically it's the same teams competing against each other year in and year out. Since these ladies seldom have international competition it's like being stuck in a rut and the game becomes boring not only for the players but for spectators. This spills over and makes it hard to get sponsors for any events they want to organize.
While many sports have started programmes for very young children like football, even in schools basketball is no longer what is used to be in the past when it was ranked the same as football and volleyball. As a result even in school competitions for the girls the quality of play is very poor with most students in secondary barely mastering the skills of dribbling, let alone shooting.
If nothing is done soon, basketball for the ladies will be a competition for the veterans; there will be simply not enough young players to keep teams going. Remember we have the Indian Ocean Games on home soil not far away, so let us not have the same results we did the last time.