We'll be bouncing with activity late next month
Thursday, October 18, 2012 by: Darren Taylor
Sault Ste. Marie will be bouncing with basketball activity late next month.
The community will play host to the 2012 OFSAA (Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations) Girls AA Basketball Championship, Thursday, November 22 to Saturday, November 24.
St. Mary’s College will serve as the host school for the tournament, which will include 18 high school girls’ basketball teams (one from each OFSAA region) for a total of about 250 young athletes.
Huron-Superior Catholic District School Board basketball coaches Adriano Carota and David Zagordo expressed their enthusiasm over the tournament as they spoke to HSCDSB trustees at the Board’s regular meeting Wednesday evening.
Zagordo told the Board this is an accomplishment for the Board and Sault Ste. Marie.
“It's not easy to attain an OFSAA championship,” he said.
“The last tournament like this Sault Ste. Marie had was back in the 1980s, at Korah Collegiate,” Zagordo noted.
The players will come from Thunder Bay to Windsor, from Fort Frances to Ottawa.
Action will take place at four venues throughout the city; St. Basil Secondary, St. Mary’s College, Sault College and Algoma University.
Zagordo said that because St. Mary’s is the host school, its team has an automatic berth, but he added “we hope to earn it.”
Zagordo and Carota told the Board that sponsors are needed to help with the tournament, the cost to run it being $18,000.
They noted that Tourism Sault Ste. Marie has helped out with some financial aid and has helped with the job of accommodating the athletes at local hotels.
Zagordo said: "The hotels are all over us, they’re really helping us.”
He added: “It's going to be an exciting time. We’ll have a few thousand visitors in town, our schools will be busy, staff will be volunteering their time. We (the HSCDSB) have two of the best schools around.”
More information on the tournament is available here.
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