Our plans for our 2020 High School Competitions have been changed with the cancellation of Winter Tournament Week
The following has just been sent out to all school contacts that had entered the 2020 McDonald’s Thomson and Whelan Competitions (20 May 2020):
BBNZ and SSNZ have now announced that there will be no basketball tournaments run in Winter Tournament Week. Click here if you have not received this information yet, and wish to read it for yourself.
This is an obviously going to be disappointing for those students who are now going to miss out on an opportunity to play in a school tournament setting, especially those in their final year of high school.
This decision does give us extra freedom as to when we run the Thomson and Whelan Competitions now. In addition to this, we also could see the importance of these competitions being increased dramatically, as there is a very real chance that results in our competition get used by BBNZ to decide on which teams will be extended invitations to compete in the Secondary School National Championships. (Discussions on the number of teams, the structure of the event and qualifying processes are occurring now with BBNZ, SSNZ, and organisations, like ours, which run high level school competitions).
Our updated calendar now sees virtually no need for any double headers. We project to only need Semi-finalist Boys’ teams in Week Nine to be available to play on Tuesday and Thursday.
We now have shifted our target start date for schools back a week (to June 23), with finals for all four divisions being played in the final week of Term Three (anticipated to play these on Monday and Tuesday in the final week of term). There are no scheduled empty weeks in this schedule, as we felt starting as late as possible while avoiding the need for all teams to play double headers was of a higher priority:
Proposed Thomson and Whelan 2020 Schedule (as of 20 May 2020)
Once schools have confirmed their entry under this updated timeline, the schedule and formats will be finalised.
Photographs courtesy BBNZ/ Dave Lintott (lintottphoto.co.nz)
