Tournament a stepping stone for women’s basketball – Slater

…as GBF National 3×3 Championship runs off today

The Guyana Basketball Federation (GBF) in an effort to develop women’s basketball throughout Guyana will commence the National Women’s 3×3 Championship today at the National Gymnasium, which is expected to be filled with exhilarating basketball action.
The tournament will see five teams – Lady Trojans, Queen B’s, Kwakwani Untouchables, Shooting Stars, and Georgetown, with teams playing in a round-robin format after which the top two teams will advance to the final in an attempt to secure supremacy.
While speaking to Guyana Times Sport, Georgetown Amateur Basketball Association (GABA) President Jermaine Slater divulged that consistent tournaments would impact the development and the growth of women’s basketball.

“Well, truth be told we did do a 3×3 tournament this year for women and we realised that we need to push a lot more in terms of our female development, so we have to continue to do tournament-by-tournament like these especially in 3×3 format, because we believe that we have a great advantage to make a dent in basketball internationally in this tournament. We don’t have enough personnel in this Diaspora to create a solid 12 team, but if we continue to do these formats with a smaller number of players, more and more females will develop and they will be able to play so this is just a stepping stone towards our development and our re-commitment to female basketball,” Slater said.
Slater went on to emphasise the need for corporate Support and the importance of athletics and Fitness training towards women’s development in basketball.
Slater shared, “We have to get more corporate involvement in terms of finances; it is a lot of work to be done. We have already gotten a business owner and a national physical trainer from the TopEnd’s fitness studio and we collaborated with him and we are allotting three females from the tournament to do athletics and fitness training, so not just more basketball. We realise that we need to be more explosive and dynamic in overall fitness so that therein of itself is part of our initiative to change the narrative and focus more on our females. We have to do much more athletic training and we have to do a lot more in clinics for these females for them to understand the concept of the game and for them to progress.”
The Winning team of the tournament will receive $150,000 along with trophies while the runner-up team will receive $75,000 with trophies and third place will pocket $65,000.