Basketball is Back; City Defenders Will Not Play at New Civic

Reynaldo Malik

The 2018 season of the National Elite Basketball League is set to begin in the coming days.  A schedule of games to be played this year was released on January ninth and it projects a number of matches for the Old Capital over the course of the next few months.  The home team, Belize City Defenders, formerly No Limit, is playing all of its games at Mercy Auditorium.  That decision was taken ahead of the opening of this season because the Belize City Center is still not available for use until April or May at the earliest.  This evening, News Five spoke with Director of Business Operations for Old Capital Sports, Reynaldo Malik.  He explains the reason why Mercy Auditorium has been chosen as the Defenders’ home court.

Reynaldo Malik, Old Capital Sports

“Everything progresses on a timeline and I know that the folks at BIL had initially expressed their thoughts that they would have been ready, or the Civic would have been ready to go right after the turn of the new year.  However, the process, as I understand it, for securing a management company for the complex has slowed down a little bit and for us at the Defenders, the explanation was given to us, I believe, I mean I would put my faith in what they told us and I totally understand that.  We feel, I mean when we came in, we knew that there was going to be a possibility of having to play somewhere else other than the Civic.  We didn’t come in with any other expectations and we knew this as far back as September and we closed our deal to buy what was then Belize City No Limit at the end of October.  So we went into that deal knowing fully well what was more than likely going to be the situation in 201, so this is really nothing new for us but we did see that yesterday the NEBL put out a schedule that did call for games to be played there.  We just wanted to make our position clear to our fans and the public in general that we are playing at the SCA starting, our first home game is scheduled for February second and so we will be at the SCA or Mercy Auditorium as it is actually called.”