Basketball in Africa

The Botswana Basketball Association (BBA) league committee has come under attack from the Botswana Defence Force (BDF) teams for failure to avail fixtures on time. BDF men and women's teams failed to honour fixtures last weekend and have laid the blame on the BBA league committee. BDF teams' assistant manager, Samuel Moalosi said they failed to honour fixtures because the BBA informed them of the weekend encounters late. Moalosi said that he was only informed via sms that the league fixtures were in his email. He said since he was engaged elsewhere he did not read the message when it came through. He thought that the fixtures would be sent out to teams as always.

Moalosi however said he was shocked on Friday when he was told that the league would begin that weekend. He said that he tried to plead with committee chairman Kabo Khama to postpone the games as his teams were not ready, but he refused. Moalosi said he feels that Khama did not want to postpone the games as he is the manager of the Police teams that were supposed to play against BDF. 'Khama knew his teams would get two soft points and he used it as an advantage,' he said. Moalosi said he has never heard of a system where fixtures are distributed via email.

He said that from the beginning, the fixtures have been printed and distributed to teams and there have never been problems. 'Some of us do not have easy access to the Internet and using it will limit our access to information,' he said. Moalosi said that Khama should have at least called him on his phone instead of sending him an sms.
'In fact, he could have used the pre-season tournament that was held a week before the league to inform us about the commencement of the league,' he sa