By Neto Baptiste
There will be no third division in the Antigua and Barbuda Basketball Association (ABBA) competition this year.
This is according to the president, Michael Freeland, who said the body, following deliberations, opted to merge the third division with the second division in an effort to make the league more competitive.
“What we’ve done is combine the two divisions and I believe it’s something like 16 or 18 teams in the third division and 12 teams in the second division, but you’d have like a Jojo 1 and Jojo 2 so it worked out to be 24 teams. So, we made the decision to go with 24 teams in the second division and we are going to put them into two zones. What would happen is that the two top teams in each zone would go to the first division next year and the two teams from the first division in the relegation zone will go down to the second division,” he said.
Freeland, who was elected unopposed as head of the association in March this year, explained that the body will launch a robust youth development league as a breeding ground for players in place of the third division.
“The only how we can get better athletes or better players is if they have regular basketball playing and if you speak to the national coach, George Hughes, he would tell you that any basketball player who wants to reach the level of semi-pro or even pro, they need to play at least 10,000 to 12,000 hours of basketball in a year, so we decided the only how we can do this is if we have an actual youth development league. If you’re going to have a youth development league then there is no reason why we should have a third division so we did away with the third division and decided we are going to start a youth development league. The youth development league will play ahead of the second division and the first division games on a nightly basis,” the administrator said.
The domestic season is expected to shoot off in September with the Cool & Smooth Business League, which was originally slated to start last weekend.
“It was scheduled for September] 4th, but in consultation with the Knights — because as you know, they are the organizers of the Business League — they indicated they would like to push it back by a week. So we are going to have a much more condensed schedule now. Everything we’re doing from this executive is because of the national programme and what happened in the past is that you’d have your season running too long and the guys would get fatigued, and with their national duties now, for them to go and play in tournaments or play FIBA or CBC, they are tired,” Freeland said.
The first division is slated to start in January while the second division will start in November.