Former national women’s players want to lead basketball association

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A former national women’s player and current executive member with the Antigua and Barbuda Basketball Association (ABBA) Kebra Nanton, has declared her intentions to challenge for the organisation’s top position when elections are held later this year.
Treasurer on the current executive, Nanton believes that solid programmes and skills-building initiatives can take the sport and its athletes to the next level.
“I would like to see a solid youth development programme implemented. I think we need more initiatives like the NBA Jumpstart and I also think that we need more programmes like back in the day when I was playing and we had the future stars programme and that was pretty exciting. It was an opportunity to learn from people from different parts of the world,” she said.
“I am also looking forward to having initiatives like what we had when I was playing where we use to travel to Milwaukee (USA) every summer and I think initiatives like that would probably help to build the interest,” she added. 
The former shooting guard also revealed plans to partner with the government in hopes of rectifying long standing issues with a number of dilapidated courts.
“I would love to see more community leagues happening and I plan on approaching the Hon [Minister of Sports] Daryll Matthew and have a discussion with him about fixing of the facilities in the different communities so that the different communities can form their own leagues and from that, I think we’d be able to get more teams participating in ABBA’s leagues from within the communities,” she said.
Nanton, who is also head of the women’s basketball committee within the current executive, said she will seek to place more emphasis on developing women’s basketball here.
“I plan to partner with the school programme to see how we can get the interest of the young girls from a younger age to be interested in basketball because I believe that is the source of our issue, that we need to get them involved from a younger age,” the former player said.
“As the female coordinator, when I first approached the executive and I told them that we need to improve the female programme and we needed to have a national team everybody supported me. We didn’t have the resources but we found a way to get the resources because we understood the importance of having a female programme,” she added.
Daryll Matthew, now minister of sports, tendered his resignation as the president of the ABBA following the country’s general elections held in March this year.
First Vice President, Carlton Broodie, assumed the role of president following Matthew’s departure but said he will not permanently seek the position at the binding elections.
The elections will take place between December 19 to 21 of this year.

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