INTER-GUIANAS FEMALE BASKETBALL

SURINAME BLOW AWAY GUYANA BY 53 POINTS.
... take Inter-Guiana Games female basketball title
By Faizool Deo
SURINAME out-hustled, out-rebounded and out-ran Guyana's female Under-19 basketball team to thrash them by 53 points yesterday, the second day of the second leg of the Inter-Guiana Games, at the Cliff Anderson Sports Hall.
With the victory and another against French Guiana (36-34) on Friday, Suriname have retained the female basketball title.
Playing on Guyana's home-court, they failed to deter the Dutch team from their ultra-aggressive approach. The visiting girls schooled the locals from the tip-off to finish the game 71-18.
They enforced full court traps which restricted the Guyanese from taking shots; these traps forced the turnover or created the steal. So poor was Guyana's scoring that in three quarters they had only seven points - a bucket scored each period. Suriname, on the other hand, had a game plan and with good rotation by coach Ray Karsodileromo they continued to excel.
Only Kean Andrews with 10 points showed any resistance to the visitors. Eight of those points were scored in the last four minutes of the game, at a time when Suriname had already established their mammoth lead.
For the Dutch team which led 32-5 at the half, four players reached double figures: Zephanya Zeefuik scored 14 points, Whitney Rijp scored 12, while Susan Lou made 11 and Tricia Abby Galer Striuken added 10.
GUYANA'S DILEMMA
The Guyanese girls, though outplayed in all aspects, were victims of bad organising. According to coach Abdulla Hamid he had 12 days of practice with the girls, a miniscule comparison to the Suriname and French Guiana teams who dedicate months to practice.
The team also had no strict criteria for selection, seeing that no competition was held to evaluate who were the best female players to represent Guyana at the games.
Hamid thinks that the players have a good future since some of them have up to five playing years remaining in the annual competition. He feels that practice should start at the end of the games today to get a jump-start on the 2008 competition. “The girls want to play.”
In theory this is the right advice, but the reality of the matter is that Guyana failed to field a team at last year's competition and the appropriate authorities knew that they had to put measures in place for this year, but nothing happened.