It was at the FERWABA general assembly meeting today Saturday 12th, September 2020 that a discussion about how the league in both men’s and women’s categories will be resumed.
The competition was suspended in March along with all other sports activities in the country as measures to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a meeting held in May this year, the federation set provisionally September 4th as the day the league would resume unfortunately this did not happen.
Today, discussion on how the 2019/20 league can be concluded plus all necessary implementations, before consultation and approval from the Ministry of Sports and the Ministry of Health, were held. These include:
- BK National League will resume with games played in tournament format taking the best eight teams for men and the best four for women. Since all the teams did not play the same number of games, the new ranking will be made according to the average points gained per game played.
- A three weeks practise before the tournament will be organised with maximum prevention measures put into place against COVID-19. All teams, officials and staff will be isolated during the competition period. All expenses will be covered by the league sponsor, Bank of Kigali.
- Competition Structure; in the men’s category, 8 teams will be divided into two groups with the top 2 in each group advancing to the semi-final. For the women, 4 teams will contend in one group and later 1st Vs 4th and 2nd Vs 3rd will be played as the semi-final. Both semi-final and final will be played as one leg.
- Schedule; team practice will be from 25th September to 15th October 2020 and the tournament from 16th-24th October 2020.
Rwanda will host both Afrobasket Qualifiers Group 4 (Nigeria, Mali, Rwanda and Algeria) between 19th and 21st November 2020 and Basketball Africa League (BAL) between 5th and 20th at the state of the Art Kigali Arena, where the National team and Patriots respectively will participate therefore the league will serve as preparation for these two competitions.
