For the past four years, the Yorkton Filipino community have shared their love of basketball with the rest of the city through the outlet known as the Parkland Basketball Association (PBA).
This season they’ll do that once again, as the PBA is back for its fifth season of basketball action. “Five years ago we started this league as a way to share our cultural love of basketball with the community, and each year the league has grown,” said PBA league chairman Jobert Del Rosario. “We’re very happy to see that the league is continuing again this summer.”
This year there will be eight teams vying for the PBA championship, representing several different communities throughout the Parkland region. “We have teams from Kamsack, Yorkton, Russell and Canora,” mentioned Del Rosario, continuing, “All in all there are eight teams that will be competing for the 2016 Parkland Basketball Association (PBA) championship.”
Del Rosario said that there could have even been more teams involved in the 2016 season, but unfortunately the PBA had to turn some teams away during registration. “There were teams that were hoping that they could join in for this season that were from Regina, Invermay, Esterhazy, Rocanville and the defending champion team from Sacred Heart here, but we just don’t have enough space to accommodate them.
“We only have the Sacred Heart gymnasium, so we can only accommodate eight teams for a round-robin and playoff tournament, but we would like to expand next year, so more teams will be the goal.”
To do that, Del Rosario believes the PBA will need a second game location. “We need to be able to find ways to accommodate a season for 16 teams, so if we can play some here in Sacred Heart and some other games at the Regional that would be great, but first we need to talk to the committee from both schools and try to get something set up.”
For now, the way the PBA will show their growth is by testing out another league after the 2016 ‘open tournament’ summer season.
That league, according to Del Rosario, will be a Filipino only league in order to get Filipino people from surrounding cities to come to Yorkton on the weekend for basketball. “Since we started five years ago we are very surprised of how many Filipino people are interested in this league from everywhere in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, because they don’t have a league to play in where they live,” offered the PBA chairman. “Filipino people are passionate about the game, so we wanted to create more of an opportunity for them to play basketball here in Yorkton and get them here to visit the city.”
Schedule
The season kicked off with a pair of games this past Sunday as the Canora Kings beat the Russell Sentinels 65-48 and Century 21 downed Harvest Meats 75-53.
The league will continue this weekend with a total of six PBA games – three Saturday and three Sunday.
Saturday’s action will see the Yorkton Aces take on Century 21 in Game One, Mark’s Work Wearhouse battle SKY Basketball Team in Game Two and the Russell Sentinels play the Canora Kings in Game Three.
Sunday will see the M. Bailey Team play Harvest Meats in the opening contest of the day, followed by the Yorkton Aces taking on SKY and Mark’s playing Century 21. All action takes place at Sacred Heart, with the first games beginning at 1:00 in the afternoon.
