KOROR (Palau) - After a long hiatus from basketball competitions, Palau basketball came back with flying colors with the ongoing boys’ high school national competition as part of its ever-growing hoops grassroots program.

Five high school programs across the archipelago are showing their wares in the Annual High School National Championship organized by Belau Independent Interscholastic Athletics Association (BIIAA) and supported by the Palau Basketball Federation.

The schools participating are Emmaus-Bethania High School (EBHS), Belau Modekngei School (BMS), Palau Mission Academy (PMA), Mindzenty High School (MHS), and Palau High School (PHS).

BIIAA is an established organization made up of high school principals laying down the carpet for the grassroots program in Palau not only for sports but also for academics.

Though it was pushed back, the tilt originally scheduled earlier this month still happened to be the first major basketball tournament in the island country this year.

“This is the first basketball competition for Palau in 2020. Our gym was under renovation, leaving community courts as our options. Most of them are not covered courts and it’s been a pretty rainy season so we had to wait a little while,” said PBF Secretary-General Jubilee Kuartei.

Palau admitted that lack of venue as a roadblock in their bid to host more local basketball competitions but remains undeterred of the mission in the long haul after seeing potential players in the ongoing high school tournament.

“We’ve not been able to secure a venue in a long time, it’s hard to develop the sport when we don’t have a venue that we can consistently run programs, we have to mostly rely on schools to allow us to do our programs but aside from basketball there is a lot of stuff going on too,” Kuartei said.

“But you can tell the skills of the athletes are more advanced, not just the players and coaches. We use this competition as an opportunity to offer our help and guidance to schools in coaching and helping the players develop their overall level of play,” she added.

Future plans for the Federation are organizing the girls’ competition scheduled for next semester while events for the elementary level are also in the pipeline.

“We are in the process of planning for an elementary school competition for next month because we want more games for the kids to learn and experience basketball while the girls' high school competition will proceed in the next school semester,” the Kuartei concluded.

FIBA