Anxious times for basketball teams

Press, 21 April 1979, Page 23

Anxious times for basketball teams

The cancellation of the qualifying tournaments for the 1979 national club basketball championships will mean some anxious moments for teams in the next few weeks. The remodelled championships now mean that teams will have to submit written applications for selection before April 27, and then the executive officer for the Basketball Federation (Mr Joe McLeod) will pick the 16 finalists for the men’s and women’s tournaments.

“We’ll be looking at the results from the three Easter tournaments pretty seriously,” said Mr McLeod Tournaments were held in Christchurch, Napier and Tauranga and the results will be taken into account when Mr McLeod and the six or seven “experts” from around the country decide on the final 16 entries for both the men and women. The men’s tournament will be held in Christchurch from June 19 to 23, and the women will compete in Napier a week before.

The teams who make the grade will be announced, seeded for the nationals, on May 11. “Picking the first 10 or 12 will be no problem, but it will be getting the swingers, about 10, and choosing the last four,” said Mr McLeod. “Particularly in the men, there will be a few teams who will miss out and think they deserved a place.” Before the petrol crisis forced the abandonment of the qualifying tournaments, a ratio: of five teams from the North Island and three from the South Island applied. No such ratio will apply this year to the 16 finalists picked, and this could cause problems for some South Island clubs.

Many top North Island teams can boast good “imported” American players, and if the seedings are directly related to performance, as Mr McLeod says they will be, then several South Island teams which might have gone close to selection will miss out.