By Neto Baptiste
Antigua and Barbuda’s participation in this year’s Caribbean Basketball Confederation (CBC) senior men’s tournament remains in limbo.
This is according to president of the Antigua and Barbuda Basketball Association (ABBA), Michael Freeland, who said the body’s executive could make a decision within days as to whether or not the country will field a team at the tournament tentatively slated for May in Miami.
Participation, he said, hinges on a number of factors.
“It’s something we just started to discuss last Friday as we got the decision on Thursday evening [from the CBC] so the executive is now considering, along with the coaches, to see if it is that we can have a team prepared to go … how many of the athletes we’re looking at have a visa and how we’re going to finance the tournament,” he said.
Suggesting that the tournament dates could change based on the response from participating teams, Freeland said prep time could also influence ABBA’s final decision.
“Preparation is twinned with expectation — so if the coaches don’t think we have sufficient time between now and travelling to prepare the team — because the expectation of any team travelling to the CBC would be qualifying and moving on to the next leg. If it is a situation or the expectation is that we are just going to compete, because we have not been playing basketball for so long and we don’t know the level, then no. We have the talent but it’s just whether or not we have the chemistry for them to perform,” the president said.
Other logistics, to include the availability of key players and readiness to travel, will also impact Antigua and Barbuda’s participation this year.
“We would have loved at least a six-month period to say that we could put these things in place. The next consideration would have been September, but September you’re talking about back-to-back qualifiers so if you qualify for these games then you’d have to move on to the next qualifiers which is the FIBA qualifiers around the end of September. I guess that is what they were trying to get away from but they made the decision so late that some of the countries are now saying that some of our guys are still overseas or at school. [So] getting now into the country for practice, figuring out visas and those sort of things may be bit challenging for quite a few of us,” Freeland said.
The Caribbean Basketball Confederation (CBC) senior men’s tournament was originally slated for February but was postponed by the organisers.