The Return of Singapore Basketball

Article by SG Basketball Coach PK Ong

A picture says a thousand words.

Dear Basketball,

It has been a really rough year for all of us. 

We lost one of the best ever in Kobe when he and his daughter Gianna both lost their lives in a helicopter crash in in January. Then the NBA got suspended for months after the NBA All-Star Weekend…

Locally, Singapore was in Circuit Breaker mode for a couple of months as well and all sport facilities and activities came to a standstill since March 2020. No basketball competition or live training and facilities like ours were forced to close. The only sport activity that could be done outside one’s house was jogging/running. 

Schools suspended all their CCAs back in February/March and many coaches and instructors immediately lost a source (and for some, their main source) of income. It was a devastating time for all sports and many businesses that were forced to suspend operations. In fact, some schools only recently resumed CCAs in the online form, and many of them did this in a very limited capacity, citing issues with conducting online training, security and other reasons. 

Our new venue, SG Basketball @ Under Armour Court (UAC) was originally scheduled to open in March, but the existing circumstances prevented this from happening. To add to our woes, we had to stop all our coaching services and tournaments at all our venues.

Like many businesses, we had to innovate and develop our capabilities in other areas during this extended break period. We also conducted Zoom sessions with our kids and a DSA workshop for our P6 trainees who were looking to apply for admission to secondary school via the DSA route. You can read more about this in Coach Victor’s article.

Prior to Circuit Breaker, we spent hours filming the Basics of Basketball series with our coaches and even more in the editing process for each basketball training video. The drills were specifically produced for viewers to be able to do these at home and they did not even need a lot of space to do so. 

Apart from this, we also did a weekly game show on Instagram to engage our audience, and started our weekly talkshow, In The Zone during this time. Our activity on social media was at an all-time high.

In this tough period, we were fortunate to have been able to retain most of our staff. We were finally allowed to reopen our facilities and resume basketball training with safety measures from 19 June 2020. All these restrictions, which are still active up till the time of this article, kept us from resuming business at full capacity but it was much better than sitting at home for the past few months. After all, the purpose of these restrictions is to help keep our staff and trainees safe.

Most indoor venues remained closed to basketball; public venues like community centres and sheltered HDB courts are at risk every day with many flouting safe distancing rules. A local MP even took a series of photos of basketball courts that were filled with too many people, and that caused several courts to be shut down.

Despite the challenges posed by the restrictions, we continued to build basketball in every way we can. Having our own venues gave us the ability to open up our venues for usage by other basketball coaches apart from our own. We want to help our industry partners stay afloat in these tough times and do our little part wherever we can. As long as we are around, we will continue to ensure that basketball never stops, just as we said in our previous article in March.

Dr Dish in action for small group training.