Hopes for AFL play

PORT Douglas coach Brad Cooper is still hopeful the AFL Cairns season can kick off.

The reigning four-time premiers have been hit as hard as any club in the competition due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the club to lose as many as 13 players due to lockdown restrictions.

AFL Cairns is planning to run a “spring series” from July 10.

“On a player recruiting basis it’s probably had the biggest effect on us. Everyone else is in a similar sort of boat, it’s thrown our lives into chaos and what not.

“We were two weeks off kicking the season off; we’ve had seven or eight players who were here at the time who have gone back home. We had over a handful also that didn’t make it here (because of COVID-19). Being the transient club that we are we rely heavily on our recruits all over Australia.”

Wigness wins award

CAIRNS Basketball’s Tamuri Wigness has been named Basketball Queensland’s male player of the year for 2019. Wigness earned international recognition at the 2019

Basketball Without Borders

Global Camp and was named in the All-Tournament Team. It added to a resume which included his leading Australia to a five-game sweep to win the U17 FIBA Oceania Championship and making the tournament’s All-Star 5, and representing the Australian Emus at the U19 FIBA World Cup. Wigness’s award comes just days after Cairns Basketball general manager Mike Scott was named BQ’s Administrator of the Year. Scott attributed his award to the team of long-serving volunteers around him, describing himself as the “marine engineer” of the operation which kept basketball going in the Far North.