In American universities, they’ve got something they call March Madness, the dramatic battle to see which team will emerge undefeated from a basketball tournament of 64 teams. Well, in Central America, we’ve got the second biennial Central American University Sporting Games held in Costa Rica. 15 universities participated in the event which started last week.
For the prestigious crown in basketball, many countries, like host country Costa Rica and Nicaragua sent four university teams, while others like Panama sent three. But Belize sent only one, the University of Belize team – and in a tournament of 15 teams, we won the gold medal game on Saturday against home team Costa Rica. It was close, as the final score was 57 to 55. The UB team was down 11 points at the half and didn’t take the lead until the fourth quarter.
They returned home on Sunday and Krem TV was there to greet them. They shared this footage with us.
Darren Bovell,
“They say they have two kinds of pain – that was our motto for the whole tournament: you have pain of regret and we have pain of hard work so all we stuck to was the pain of hard work. That was the whole motto for the whole tournament. We only took nine men and we beat 2.8 million people in Costa Rica, the University alone has 80,000 people. So that is what these young boys did, the future of Belize.”
Kevin Seroki, Coach
“We played five games in six days. These guys are mentally drained, physically drained but they worked their butts off. It all came down to being a team and being a family so that’s what it took to win the gold medal. We are really happy to bring something back home and we only look forward to going to better heights.”
Player #1,
“Hard to explain, it’s just unbelievable. It is just hard to explain.”
Player #2,
“It feels real good you know because we worked every morning, six in the morning and also nine at night so finally the hard work paid off.”
Player #3,
“We feel really good to bring home the gold and make the country proud and make the university proud.”
Player #4,
“It feels good as everybody says and for everybody that was out there, we proved to ourselves and all the hard work paid off, all the work out from six in the morning and the two times a day workout - it just feels good.”
Kirk Shabba Smith,
“A lot of obstacles we went through and these guys just never gave up, they just hung in there. There were a lot of close games, a lot of people always talk about the competition is not tough but when they see the tapes, they will know the different type of competition these guys were facing. Man, I met some of the guys from Panama national team playing at the university and these guys were no joke. But our guys just had heart and we hung in there and we pulled right out and I am very proud of them.”
In the gold medal game, Stephen Williams had 25pts and 12 rebounds, while Travis Lennan had 13pts, and 10 rebounds. The Belize team played 6 games in 5 days.
