A Celebrity Basketball Showcase to Raise Funds to Help Primary School in Dangriga
This Saturday at the Russel Chiste Garcia Auditorium in Dangriga, the fourth annual Celebrity Basketball Showcase takes place. Dubbed the Quadrennium, the event brings together local personalities from the Culture Capital and elsewhere to participate in a friendly basketball match to raise money to fund a particular project or organization. Among the list of Belizean celebrities are Adrian “the Doc” Martinez, Commissioner of Police Chester Williams, BSAG Commander Zenon Ciego, as well as well-known electricians, teachers, barbers and community activities. Logistics personnel Austin Petillo says that this year, an expo among other events will commence as early as seven a.m.
Austin Petillo
On the Phone: Austin Petillo, Logistic Personnel, Celebrity Basketball Committee
“This year we go from the morning time at seven o’clock with a ten-mile pelathon around the town for those who feel like they are in shape. Thereafter, we have a sales expo which runs from eight o’clock to five o’clock. And then during that, we have at one-thirty a first ever jacks and ball marathon for the kids; we’ll have performance by SSDC group; we’ll have live stage performances. Games all day, sales all day, good food, deals on products and so on and then we close off at five. At six o’clock, the door opens for the actual games itself, for the celebrity basketball showcase. First game we have Ecumenical versus Delille, a throwback game. After that we have the Atlantic Insurance skills challenge to feature women in sports this year. And then the big celebrity basketball matchup itself: this year, Team Boogie, the green team versus Team Lisbey, the red team. It started back in 2016 in my house where we were discussing about something to give back to Dangriga and we came up with musicians celebrity basketball. That first year, the musicians played the game and the next year, we had issues with the musicians who had jobs and we couldn’t hire everybody. So they agreed that we start to bring in others from communities. We tweaked it and now we have members represented from each walk of life from the community in this event now. So now we have the fourth annual celebrity basketball where everybody can be involved.”
The goal is to raise fifteen thousand dollars and the proceeds will be used to fund six months of feeding programmes at three primary schools in that southern municipality: namely, Holy Ghost RC School, Christ the King Anglican and Epworth Methodist.
