More teams arrive for CARICOM Games
While things appear to be going well for the Belize Team on the court, the overall organization of the CARICOM Basketball Championships reminds us that… well… this is the Caribbean. Case in point: the Jamaican National Teams. Both the men’s and women’s squads are defending champions but thus far they’ve been defending no-shows. Scheduled to arrive this morning on American, they were nowhere to be found and this evening the TACA flight from Miami was similarly lacking in Jamaicans. All was not lost; however, as the men and women from Barbados arrived as did the women from the Bahamas, Guyana and Antigua. Arreini Palacio was at the airport to meet them.
Lyndon Alphonso, Coach, Guyana Female Team
“Well basically we have a small team so we have to run the ball up and down the court; you know we have to trade our speed for size and our size for speed. We are not taking anybody for granted. We came here to defend the title and we are looking forward to doing so successfully.”
The other island girls think that they will give Guyana a run for their money.
Candy Jones, Antigua Female Team
“We’re young still. We’re just coming up but I think that we have done well in the past and we’re hoping to do much better.”
Prudence Edwards, Antigua Female Team
“We coming harder. We going home with the gold, so tell them change their minds.”
And coming just as hard is the Barbadian male team.
Mark Harding, Coach, Barbados Male Team
“We have two players who would have played, one guy who plays semi-professional in England, Nigel Lloyd, who is the captain. We have another guy who plays in the U.S. Basically all our other players are home based players. We had four or five in the previous CARICOM Games in 1996 Trinidad.”
Dwayne Brian, Barbados Male Team
“We plan on running the ball hard up and down the court and play defense; that is the only way to go.”
And all the players agree that another way to go lies in the strategy, which they won’t reveal.
Sonia Burke, Barbados Female Team
“I’ll leave that for the other teams to see as the tournament goes on. I really don’t want to tell what our strategy is right now.”
Candy Jones
“We have strategies and we have plays, but we would like to keep it a secret until we get on the court, you know.”
Arreini Palacio for News Five.
Just before news time we spoke to our colleagues at C.V.M. Television in Jamaica who told us that the teams from J.A. will be coming but have not yet left the island. It was only today that the final women’s roster was announced and the men’s final cut will not be made until later tonight. So it seems that the Belize team was not so last minute after all. On a more serious note it looks like the men’s tournament will only be a four horse race as the Guyana men’s team apparently has visa problems and is not likely to make it. The Jamaicans, therefore, have got to come in order to make the minimum of four teams, which are necessary to hold the official tournament. We’ll keep our fingers crossed for tomorrow.
