Basketball
Basketball probably has the biggest people in Belize after football. It is governed by the Belize Basketball Federation (BBF), basketball's highest classification is semi-professional; the league (known as the Belize Basketball Association (BBA) was established in 1992). Matches are frequently held at the junior, senior amateur, high and primary school levels, and even the Mini tournament for little kids and Over-35 tournaments for retired players. There is a basketball court of some sort in every neighborhood and children can be seen practicing regularly.
Belize has held regional championships in the Caribbean (1998) and Central America (2001) but has not been to the Olympics. A number of Belizeans, such as Nigel Miguel, Milt Palacio, Kenton Paulino and Charles Burgess, play or have played basketball at the college and NBA level in the United States. Paulino led the University of Texas to the 2005 Elite Eight; Burgess played for Texas Tech. Palacio graduated from Colorado State and played for several NBA teams, most recently the Utah Jazz; Miguel hails from UCLA and briefly tried out for the New Jersey Nets in the 1980s.
Read more about this topic: Sport In Belize
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)