Primary kids get basketballs
Tony Strange says it’s a great feeling when he’s out and about and sees children walking along bouncing their new basketball.
Tony, the community participation manager of the Lake Taupo¯ Basketball Association, arranged for every primary school student entered in this year’s primary school basketball competition to receive a free basketball of their own.
The basketball presentation was partly to compensate for the fact that Covid-19 severely restricted this year’s basketball competition, Tony explains. The primary school competition that usually ran on a Friday was particularly badly affected by the lockdown with the young players missing out on about four weeks of competition.
“Mums and dads paid $45 for the 12-week competition and the kids only got to play eight or nine [weeks],” Tony says. “And what we found was some people wanted to get reimbursed. So I came up with a provider of basketballs, and we got 300 basketballs.
“I went to every school that had teams in our primary school competition and I got up on the stage and said ‘because of Covid the competition was affected, and we’re going to give all you kids a basketball for free’.”
Tony says the basketball giveaway by him and the basketball youth coaches has been a really good initiative, with some extra spinoffs.
“Teachers are saying, ‘this is so cool’. And kids getting a basketball, that means that they can be active and the parents see the kids getting
something.
“Driving to work today we saw a kid bouncing a ball along the street and it was exactly one of our balls. I wished I had a photo.”
Tony says the intermediate and secondary school basketball competitions, although they had restricted spectators, were not as badly affected because they used fewer courts, although he says trying to bring people in one door and send them out the other was “a logistical nightmare”. However the primary competition was the biggest one which made it difficult when
gatherings were restricted to under 100 people.
“The primary [competition] was affected because of the amount of kids on a Friday, it was chaos in a really good way. At any stage in the Taupo¯ Events Centre we had four mini hoops running with at least 20 kids on each court which tipped us over the 100 that we had to stay under, plus mums and dads wanting to stay and watch.
“At one stage stage [pre-Covid] we had both sides of the events centre full of spectators. It was awesome and crazy, I loved it.”