Let’s DriBBle

The IPL was an instant hit, whether the reason that it brought together anyone who was anything in India or for its cheerleaders. On similar lines, there has been an initiative for a ‘Basketball Premier League’ , commonly referred to as BPL in our campus. It all started with a mail from the organizers for interested players to fill in names in a spreadsheet. You also had to have a reference from a regular Basketball player at IIIT-H.

After this came the interesting part – the auction. Each of the six owners who had to bid for roughly eight players in their team, were given 1000 units of currency. The players were distributed in 3 categories- pro, regular and beginners, which was also the order in which the players were brought up for auction. The bidding process spanned two days. The first day was allotted for profile analysis of each player. All the owners keenly analyzed these profiles and made a note of the players they wished to own, according to their strategies. The second day was for the bidding of players with Hariprasad to be the first one to go under the hammer. He was followed by Abhishek , Yuvraj Singh and the remaining 50 players. This was a very exciting process with some very aggressive and intense bidding. In the end every owner had a good team to fight with. The costliest players were the likes of Lalit Kundu, Hariprasad, Abhishek and Raghuram.

Ping! contacted Divij Rao and Deepank Joshi, take a look on what they have to say. “Basketball is the most athletic game in my humble opinion, as it requires strength in both upper body and lower body. It requires intelligence as to when to pass or shoot, have coordination in the team thus helping in developing ‘team-building’ quality. BPL is an event which is
conducted aiming at improving the level of the abilities and interests of students in the sport. Anyone and everyone who was willing to play even if they don’t know much but want to learn were invited to play in this league.” The organizers hope that this becomes a legacy, with the present third years organizing this tournament even better next year improving over this year’s, and the present second years organizing it, improving it even further.

Looking forward to this exciting event on campus, and encouraging gender equality, Nitya Tiwari is taking the lead in organizing Women’s Basketball Premier League alongside Divij Rao and Abhayjeet Singh.