Shelburne Shocks basketball club looking for players to fill out ranks on the court

Written By BRIAN LOCKHART

The Shelburne Shocks are planing to build their basketball club from the ground up.

With no organized basketball club currently in Shelburne, many players routinely travel to Orangeville to play in that town's organization.

Shocks founders Sherwin Stephens, Karen Gordon-Stephens, Ryan Mainelli, and David McLean have efforts underway to build a club with both house league and rep teams.

The new club held a welcome and information session at TrainerGames Fitness Centre on Saturday, May 4.

“Today is an information session and the original kick-off day of our program,” Sherwin explained. “What we're trying to do today is get numbers to see how many kids are interested. We're trying to get a feel of what they want. We're definitely going with a house league. We want to start with young kids around the age of five then up to kids around 17. It's all about numbers. We have to get a feel for how much interest there is.”

Sherwin is a basketball coach and noticed that many of the players he was coaching came from Shelburne.

“I was coaching in Orangeville and I noticed that on my team team there was 12 kids that all came from Shelburne,” Sherwin said. “I thought since there was so much interest in Shelburne, why were these kids going to Orangeville – lets bring it home and do this all for our town.”

Basketball has been noted as the fastest growing sport in Canada with a lot of interest and new clubs and teams springing up across the country.

There is already a lot of interest at the local level and Shelburne high school teams have had a lot of success over the past few years.

There has been quite a bit of interest in the Shocks from not only Shelburne but the surrounding area including Dundalk were kids have expressed an interest in playing the sport.

Starting up a new sports club is a lot of work and Sherwin and his team are working towards a fall start.

“We're prepared to take the club wherever they want to go,” he said of putting together a program based on the response of the local population. “Between the ages of 12 to 17 are the ones we really want to get for a rep team, but if they're not ready for rep, we'll work with house league.”

You can find out more about the Shelburne Shocks by emailing the club at shelburneshocksbasketball@gmail.com.