Basketball summer competition begins for Manjimup

As the weather starts to warm up, so too does the Manjimup Basketball Association’s Summer Competition. Junior boys’ teams will play on Monday from 4.30pm to 8.30pm and the junior girl teams will play on Tuesday from 4:30pm to 8:30pm. The senior teams play on Wednesday from 6pm to 9pm, at the Manjimup Recreation Centre. The competition will run fixtures for 15 weeks for junior teams, and 17 weeks for senior teams, with finals fixture being played afterwards. Thirteen men’s teams and 14 women’s teams will play in the senior team division, while the junior divisions will have about five teams per division, according to Manjimup Basketball Association president Aaron Pedlar. “We’ve got healthy numbers and the competition looks good,” he said. Mr Pedlar said a priority for the competition was to have a setting for young people to be active. “One of our key goals is to get young people active in a healthy and safe environment and that’s the service we provide to the community,” he said. “A priority for us is maintaining the engagement of the under-14s, so they go through to the under-16s, the under-19s and eventually the senior competitions.” He noted the senior competition as a more casual and social game, rather than an official competition, with the main goal being to get people participating in the sport. “Our seniors play more for social and as a competitive outlet,” he said. “We just want people playing and enjoying sport.” Manjimup will be hosting an under-15s basketball carnival on October 23, which is set to bring about 500 people to the town. “Parents, grandparents, everyone comes down, he said. Mr Pedler said the region was lucky to have the local basketball association, both for organising the upcoming carnival, and for their hard work in running the summer competition. “I’m very fortunate we have got a full committee and a lot of people do a lot of things to make basketball work,” he said. “Booking courts, making training schedules, dealing with uniforms, writing out scoresheets, organising teams, all that stuff happens before we even throw the ball up.”