The Team

The Team

This is a project to get the South African basketball community talking to each other by sharing information.

My name is Victor Shakineza; I have been involved in basketball for a few years now as player and a coach. I have been involved in coaching for about 10 years mainly in Gauteng with schools such as Pretoria High School for Girls, Pretoria Boys High School, The Glen High School, at university level with the University of Pretoria first teams for boys and girls in 2007. After realizing the lack of information about the game of basketball in South Africa, I had the vision of setting up this website last year to try and keep the fans informed with the basketball happenings. After the trials and tribulations of the website in 2007, which was a learning curve for me and everyone involved I have ironed out a few of the issues I had as far as content, updating and appeal are concerned. Thank you for the feedback that was given to me from various people, the new look website will include some pictures, more information and be more interactive than before. But the website www.mybasketball.co.za in 2008 and beyond will still be mainly about South Africa basketball news including schools, university, club news and any other news available out there.

With the help of Darren Gorton a former teammate of mine at the University of Pretoria, Nthabiseng Mushi a former player of mine also at the University of Pretoria and Nenad Jovanovic a former player of mine at a school I used to coach, we are hoping to provide better up-to-date information to all the basketball lovers out there. I cannot thank them enough for being genuine about their interest in the sport and for making time out of their busy lives to contribute to this project.

This is the mybasketball.co.za dream team:

Darren is born and bred in South Africa, he has been out of the game for a while due to other life priorities (family, work…) but after chatting to him recently, I quickly realized that he still had a huge passion for the game and could make a huge contribution to this project with some of the knowledge he has gained over the last few years. For those of us lucky enough to see him play; you will understand when I say that Darren was the “white flying machine” back in the days.

Nthabiseng is also born and bred in South Africa; she only started playing basketball at tertiary level in 2006 and has been hooked since. I got to know her well last year and at the beginning of this year I asked her to help out by sending me some reports on the Tuks basketball team and before I could finish the sentence, she was doing more and more reports on basketball in Mzansi. She was the last one to join the mybasketball team but her contribution to this project has been outstanding.

Last but not least, Nenad Jovanovic is originally from Serbia like his surname suggest and if you know anything about Serbians, they take their sports seriously; sometimes to a fanatical level. He is a basketball player and supporter ever since I have known him but like a lot of people in South Africa his involvement in basketball stopped after High School. He has been a great contributor to this project since it started and continues to provide great advice and help maintaining it. He is a great friend that encouraged me to pursue this idea and helped implement it at the start.

The good thing about these friends and teammates of mine is that they share a similar passion for basketball and they want to share it with the rest of the South African basketball community.

We hope that 2008 will be the beginning of better things for this project and basketball in SA and you can help make it a success by giving us your support through the website and by spreading the word about its existence.