Hey,

Happy Easter! Hope you are all preparing for a relaxing few days and enjoying the sunshine which has finally decided to rear its head.

(You bought your ticket for #HASC22 yet?! Early-bird discounts only available for another couple weeks!)

This week's 3-pointer:

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England U18s clean sweep at Four Nations

Both the England U18 Men and England U18 Women went unbeaten at the Four Nations tournament in Cardiff this week. Doesn't seem to have been a worthwhile exercise from a development point of view and screams of something political when there could have just been GB training camps with competitive friendlies arranged...we've got the GB U20s being canned because there wasn't the funding, but home nations tournaments taking place...make it make sense.

📺 Hoopsfix Live

If you follow my personal on Twitter, you may have seen I've been teaching myself how to code over the last year - Hoopsfix Live is the fruits of my labour, the first rails app I've managed to somehow build with the help of many people across the internet. It's a live stream directory for fans to be able to watch British basketball for free each week, with teams being able to submit their streams for approval in a single, centralised location. Still ironing out a few kinks, and hopefully in the next week will be integrating it into main site as an embeddable widget so you can always find whatever games are being streamed!

📰 The missed opportunities & unfulfilled potential of British basketball

This article in the Guardian has been doing the rounds this week. For those that are involved in British basketball, it is nothing new; I would have liked to have seen the journalist - who used to play himself - bring some different angles to the table. That said, it does amaze me just how many people seem to be completely deluded as to where the sport is at - they would have preferred the article to focus on the potential (which, once again, is the same old trope we've heard for the past 5 decades). Only way for meaningful change is for people to be real about where the sport currently is - not look at everything through rose-tinted glasses and pretend it's all great and on the come up. You can't find solutions to the problems if you're lying to yourself about what the problems are (or that there are any problems at all!).

That wraps up another week, as always hit reply with any thoughts, questions or anything else.

With gratitude,

Sam

P.S. Check out the BBL top 10 plays from week 27, led by the London Lions' teamwork!