No cage teams for Mini SPG

It’s final. The Commonwealth will not be represented in the basketball competition of the 2005 South Pacific Mini Games in Palau.

In a board meeting Tuesday night, the Basketball Association of the Northern Marianas Islands voted against sending both a men’s and women’s basketball team to the quadrennial event slated for July 24-Aug. 4.

While the non-sending of a men’s team has, for some time now, been a foregone conclusion, the decision not to send coach Donald Blondin’s women’s team to Palau came as a big surprise.

Blondin himself campaigned against sending his own team, suggesting that the $10,000 BANMI would supposedly be raising for the trip to Palau be used instead for the development of women’s basketball on the islands.

The Marianas High School physical education teacher said, although he knows it would break the hearts of his players, the decision not to go is the more responsible thing to do.

Blondin said sending a team to Palau is shortsighted given the fact that Micronesian powerhouse Guam itself is not expecting to win that many games in Palau. He said at this point in time, the CNMI is still behind their southern neighbor and would lose an average of 20 points against a team from Guam.

Blondin noted that $10,000 would go a long way in developing women’s basketball in the CNMI. Currently, the women’s basketball team doesn’t own any water jugs, towels, a first aid kid, much less enough basketballs.

Blondin also said that given a chance he would like to have both—funding for the trip to Palau and money to spend for development—but since he could only chose one he opted to have the latter.

BANMI president Mike Muna was the only member who voted in favor of sending the women’s basketball team to Palau saying they deserved to go. Secretary-treasurer Mike White, for his part, said he initially sided with Muna, but out of respect for Blondin’s sentiments, he changed his vote to a “no.”

While the decision to exclude the women’s team in the Palau Min Games was a painful one, BANMI didn’t had that much trouble bringing the axe down on the men’s team.

Unlike women’s basketball, there’s no standing men’s basketball team in the CNMI. And while the women deserved to represent the Commonwealth in the Mini SPG after their third place finish in the Micronesian Basketball Tournament last July, men’s basketball has been on a downward spiral for years now and bottomed out with a sixth place finish in the MBT.

BANMI board member Jerome Ierome originally wanted to resurrect the men’s basketball program orphaned by close friend Rufino Aguon a year ago and field a men’s team to Palau, but after hearing arguments against it from fellow board members Blondin and Gabriel White withdrew his appeal.

Mike White, meanwhile, said since there is no national basketball team training and the last one didn’t exactly proved itself worthy in the last MBT, the CNMI shouldn’t send a men’s team to Palau.

Again the lone vote to send a men’s team to Palau came from Muna, who quipped “I have to be the bad guy and vote to send a men’s team to Palau.”

With the decision not to send basketball teams to Palau, the CNMI will now only be sending delegates to nine sports, namely track and field, baseball, beach volleyball, softball, swimming, table tennis, lawn tennis, triathlon, weightlifting, and possibly canoeing.