Ballina on the brink

Ballina on the brink

Daniel Carey

BALLINA basketball club chairman Pádraig Moore has admitted that the club’s future is ‘in jeopardy’ after a major internal split came to a head last weekend.
Merry Monk beat Star of the Sea from Belfast in the Superleague last Saturday night, but the players who travelled north for the game did so against the wishes of the club’s committee. Internal tensions have been simmering throughout the season, but division within the club has now become glaringly public.
The club announced on Friday that they were ‘unwilling to fulfil’ the following night’s Superleague fixture unless Basketball Ireland withdrew a press release they had issued earlier that day. Following an emergency meeting on Friday night, the club issued a statement saying  its committee was ‘outraged’ by the content of the press release issued by the national governing body, which it said had ‘inaccurately reported’ a decision taken by the club in relation to their continuing  Superleague involvement.
It later emerged, the statement added, ‘that the Basketball Ireland press release was based on unofficial communication rather than official club communications.’
A previous emergency meeting last Wednesday seemed to offer some hope, with Seán McHale installed as coach and players from the Division One team agreeing to make themselves available for Superleague games. However, the club’s debts remain substantial, and it is now clearly riven by major internal strife. Whether the club will fulfil next Saturday’s Superleague fixture against UCC Demons remains to be seen.
Pádraig Moore confirmed last night (Monday) that the two Americans who played on Saturday night, Eryk Thomas and Puff Summers, have been released officially by the club.
“On Friday night the club decided that we were going to hold out and see what happened,” Moore told The Mayo News. “Liam McHale and First Division players contacted Basketball Ireland on Friday evening and went ahead and fulfilled the fixture. Basketball Ireland ruled that it was okay for [them] to do that. The Irish Superleague players involved didn’t travel.”
Moore argued that the Division One players’ decision to fulfil the fixture ‘took away a lot of our bargaining power with Basketball Ireland’. He explained that Ballina were looking for extra funding from the national governing body. That appeal fell on deaf ears once the players travelled and their bona fides was accepted by Basketball Ireland, according to the chairman.
“Once the First Division team went to Belfast and played, they [Basketball Ireland] no longer needed the Superleague team,” he explained. “So they had no reason to put any funding in, and that undermines our ability to get an extra bit of money out of Basketball Ireland … [That] places the future of the club in jeopardy.”