What’s not to love about Basketball? It’s fun, competitive, gives you the opportunity to make new friends, it can take you around the world, promotes team work and exercise, it’s indoors (a great one for the parents!) and with the introduction of Stride Basketball, is a game you can play at any age. We could go on and on about the benefits, and they are the reasons why Basketball is one of the highest participated sports in the country.

Sometimes in the heat of the moment, these benefits can be forgotten. We have all seen times where people have acted inappropriately and the idea of winning can overtake the reasons they decided to become involved in the game in the first place. It’s not because they’re bad people. It’s because winning feels great. Sometimes the response of ‘our kids needed the win’ is used as justification for poor behavior when really, there is no excuse. But as Isaac Newton once said ‘Every action has an equal and opposite reaction’. And here it is.

John Bowell of the Laurimar Thunder Basketball Club coaches the U10/4 boys. On Saturday 12^th August, his team were ahead by a large margin. This could have been the time to try and ‘win by as much as possible’. Instead, John pulled his team back and decided to work on other skills, rather than increase the margin. At the conclusion of the match, John invited the opposition into his team huddle and gave them some amazing words of encouragement. Not only did this allow the opposition to feel a sense of dignity, it also taught his team a valuable lesson about respecting your opposition regardless of the result.

The DVBA would like to congratulate and thank John for his sportsmanship and hope that we can all follow his fantastic example.