Kieran Shannon: Why Irish basketball is in a race against time

Ireland captain Jason Killeen celebrates with team-mates after the FIBA Men's European Championship for Small Countries day five match between Ireland and Malta at National Basketball Arena in Tallaght, Dublin. Photo by Eóin Noonan/Sportsfile

After having its doors closed for so long, Irish basketball is finally beginning to see a chink of light, to the point it might even be becoming a beacon.

Last Sunday evening the Irish senior men’s team won the FIBA European Championships for Small Nations on its home court, the image of a confetti-drenched Jason Killeen lifting the trophy making the RTÉ nine o’clock news after their excellence throughout most of the week had gone unnoticed by the national broadcaster and indeed wider media and public.

It’s of course totally understandable why they had struggled to command headlines and attention.

The day the championships began Kellie Harrington was parading around the same town with an Olympic gold medal. The following day Messi was being paraded in Paris. On top of that you have the GAA championships coming to a climax.

When you’ve had the drama of Cork-Kilkenny, Mayo-Dublin, and indeed Kerry-Tyrone, it’s a hard sell to make a big deal about Ireland-Andorra and Ireland-Malta in hoops.

But for basketball itself in this country it was a huge deal.

You have to go back to 1994 when Ireland last won something like this when current coach Mark Keenan captained a senior squad to what was then known as the Promotions Cup.

And for even further context you only have to go back to as recently as four months ago. Back then it was doubtful if Ireland would be able to participate in any European tournament this summer let alone host one. Over half of Keenan’s squad hadn’t played a competitive game in more than a year and gone six months without so much as even being able to train with a teammate.

But then in late April after intense lobbying from Basketball Ireland to the government’s agencies they got the green light to commence training in the National Basketball Arena at weekends.

So did the senior national women’s team who went on to be compete in Cyprus in late July, impressively reaching the final of their FIBA small countries championship before losing narrowly to Luxembourg. Now that the men have gone a step further, Irish basketball is now looking at making the quantum leap.

From what this column understands, Basketball Ireland is having serious internal conversations about returning to proper European senior A competition for the first time since it had to withdraw all national teams in the wake of the association’s financial crisis of 2009-2010.

Indeed it could even be in a position as soon as today or tomorrow to announce it is returning to full senior European competition, meaning teams like France and Spain that were vying for Olympic medals could soon be playing an Irish team in the National Basketball Arena.

Players that had Timmy McCarthy going all boomshakalaka in Tokyo, rubbing shoulders against the likes of Kevin Durant and Diana Taurasi, could be rubbing shoulders against Jordan Blount and Claire Melia in 2022.

In many ways, it is a no-brainer, the obvious next progression. The European Small Countries, a week-long tournament held every second summer, was a natural and necessary stepping stone for Ireland when it restored its senior national teams in the autumn of 2015. The national governing body still hadn’t fully cleared its debt when it first participated in those championships in 2016. But now it has.

And it has the players. Four of the team that started for Keenan last week have all played or will play NCAA Division One basketball — John Carroll, Jordan Blount, Sean Flood and CJ Fulton.

The fifth starter, Lorcan Murphy, with his spectacular aerial game and athleticism, is another whose talent deserves a bigger stage. It has now outgrown the Small Countries.

The senior women’s team is just as talented, possibly even more so. Captain Edel Thornton has played in March Madness for Quinnipiac University while the quartet of Claire Melia, Dayna Finn, Sorcha Tiernan, and Rachel Huijsdens have the potential to form a golden generation of Irish player, having each had stellar campaigns at U18 and U20 level where they won podium spots and promotion to the European A level and now having all started and starred in Cyprus.

Going for gold this summer would have ignited them but after demonstrating that they are considerably superior to most teams at that level, the prospect of yet another Small Countries campaign would hardly float their boat the same way.

Last Saturday Finn played for Mayo against Dublin in Croke Park. To retain a talent like hers in the medium term, basketball has to soon offer a similar big stage, like a big European night in the Arena.

It would be a huge morale boost for Irish basketball. Before the financial crisis of 2009, having our own senior national teams play regular European qualification games in the Arena and abroad was something everyone used to take for granted. That’ll never be the case again.

Little in Irish basketball ever will after — or with — Covid, such as its national leagues.

Yesterday there was further good news for the sport here with the announcement that the 2021-2022 national league season will commence in early October, with teams allowed to start training indoors from next Monday.

Who knows when any of us will be allowed back in to see a game in the flesh but at least we’ll be able to see one online in October.

The downside to that statement was that there was still no mention of when children or indeed your average adult club player can expect to resume playing the game indoors.

For as much as Basketball Ireland has been campaigning to the government and Sport Ireland on behalf of its membership and this is the time of year when clubs are normally going about their pre-season, the Government wasn’t going to deviate from its own timelines just to accommodate basketball’s. At the end of the month it will issue its latest roadmap to the opening up of the country but not before then.

The intervening vacuum will exasperate some of the grassroots of the sport but it has grounds for optimism. It’s the nature of restrictions and the easing of them that sportspeople with ‘elite’ status go first, because there are fewer of them and they can act as a trial study.

To date, there is not a single case of Covid that has been traced back to a basketball activity.

Should that record remain intact over the coming weeks as national leagues resume congregating, then children and clubs should expect to be back training indoors by mid-September and competing by mid-October.

It is imperative for the sport that it does.

The longer the wait goes and the wetter and colder the weather turns, the more kids will be lost to the sport.

It needs those gym doors back open to them before Halloween — even more than it needs its senior national teams back competing in normal European competition.