September 19 and the Glaswegian wind is blowing through Kelvin Hall. The basketball game is in the dying minutes and the atmosphere is electric. Newcastle has been behind Glasgow for most of the match and the fans’ excitement for winning the match is growing as the gap gets smaller. Then suddenly the team comes back fighting in two overtime’s to secure a win.
You wouldn’t think that there were only a handful of fans that made the journey to support the team unlike the masses of people that follow Newcastle United Football club. Football is huge in England; we live and breathe it no matter if we follow it or not.
Basketball is a different story; this country has a successful basketball league. The Newcastle Eagles in particular have been named the most successful team in the country ever. However, it does not have a large fan base, this is down to the lack of media coverage to make the game a valid British sport.
The United Kingdom newspapers think of it as an American Sport and tend to concentrate on “British” sports such as Football in the press. We shouldn’t have to stick by this.
Sports journalists in Britain are stubborn on what they think are more news worthy and fail to accommodate newer sports that are growing in popularity. For example, fishing has one of the highest participation levels in the UK but newspapers don’t cover it to the same extent they cover football.
The Newcastle Eagles has a massive fan base; there can be up to 3,000 people at a home match. However, they would get many more people interested in the team if they knew more about it. A lot of people form an opinion without knowing anything about it –newspapers have the ability to change this.
My dad is the prime example, he thought that basketball was “a bunch of Americans playing netball” and the only reason he went was to support me when I was dancing there. He has admitted that other than briefly playing basketball at school, he knew nothing about the sport and as the captain of the school’s rugby team he thought that it was for softies.
He started to like the game because he “tried to understand it” and that intensified his feelings towards it. If the newspapers and press have more coverage of the BBL there would be more knowledge and from this more people would discover this exciting league. Now my dad loves basketball, he never misses a home match and gets to as many away matches as he can. The spare room is covered in posters and signed shirts he has bought.
The Newcastle Eagles enjoyed their 13th silverware in six years last season and with such a successful team you would think they would get more media coverage. This isn’t the case. I looked at the local papers the day after the home match on October, 15 2010 won against Glasgow Rocks and the majority of the sports section was predominantly about football even though nothing had happened, the day before, the stories were all about the players or strategies. The headline in the Journal that day was: “Perch: We must win this time.”
If the press don’t get with the times it won’t affect the basketball circuit – the fans that they have already are loyal. However, a lot of people are being starved of excitement, atmosphere and fun at something they may enjoy if they even knew about it.
The press shouldn’t just stick to the status quo that was set for us by the narrow minded. They are depriving everybody of the excitement and tension of the dying seconds in a close basketball match.
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