All tournaments planned for this year by the Caribbean Basketball Confederation (CBC) have been blown off until 2021.
President of CBC, Glyne Clarke, said that the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) has mandated that all championships this year including those hosted by the CBC be suspended.
Clarke explained that going forward they would monitor closely what is happening around the world because even though they are planning to have those tournaments played sometime next year, there were no guarantees that the host countries would be ready.
“We will be monitoring to see how the world is recovering and it is subject to the governmental restrictions this will have on countries. Even though we may restart, some countries might not be in a position to start as well.
“We are actually in the process of sending out some communication to the member countries, not only to check on their state of readiness but in terms of being able to play and what the government restrictions are.
“In terms of financing, as you know many of the Caribbean countries depend heavily on assistance from the government in their competitions. So it is how well they are able to recover and to get the funding both governmental and corporate to help the teams to compete,” he said.
During a recent meeting, Clarke noted that the CBC management had decided to use this time to do some online training, particularly for the coaches.
“We have already started from the Americas doing some virtual programs like Zoom and so on with coaching at different levels. But what we are going to be doing too at the Caribbean level is working on developing our mini-league coaches and the mini-league programs, and also doing some training for the referees and table officials.
“We are capitalizing on the downtime to make sure people get the training and in many areas now people are more receptive now to doing training online than before. This also saves some cost as well,” he said.
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