{"id":32190,"date":"2025-09-19T22:02:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T22:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/32190\/"},"modified":"2025-09-19T22:02:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T22:02:07","slug":"national-title-hopes-for-basketball-tall-black-and-schoolmates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/32190\/","title":{"rendered":"National title hopes for basketball Tall Black – and schoolmates"},"content":{"rendered":"

After the tournament, starting Monday, Ball heads to Illawarra Hawks in the Australian NBL, returns for the New Zealand NBL, then joins the Wisconsin Badgers<\/a> in the United States.<\/p>\n

His appearance as a national senior basketball representative in a schools\u2019 tournament is not particularly rare.<\/p>\n

Former Hastings Girls\u2019 High School player Pahlyss Hokianga<\/a>, the youngest-ever Tall Fern national women\u2019s team member, has played for Tauranga Girls\u2019 High School. <\/p>\n

Hokianga relocated last year to gain national league experience with Tauranga team the Whai.<\/p>\n

Henare lists Ball\u2019s younger brother, Kees, Hawks development programme players Isaac Allen, Lennox Singh and Balin Gasson, and starting point guard Gyle Adams as others potentially going places.<\/p>\n

With US colleges now able to pay players direct, the NZ Herald reports 60 New Zealand players – 36 female and 24 male – have been confirmed on Division 1 US college rosters for 2025-2026.<\/a><\/p>\n

Their scholarships come with high academic standards, another sign of the times.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think when we won the title in 1992 most of the players could have been suspended for (non) attendance,\u201d Henare reckoned.<\/p>\n

NBHS have five games in pool play, starting against Cashmere High School, of Christchurch, and Pukekohe High School on Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After the tournament, starting Monday, Ball heads to Illawarra Hawks in the Australian NBL, returns for the New…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[95,4765,30642,26568,7022,1848,10712,30640,1888,2082,2959,3012,30641,3607,3556,111,139,529,69,6292,30639,6649,5843,213,30638,7187,2044,2563,16559,1530],"class_list":["post-32190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-and","tag-annual","tag-ball","tag-basketball","tag-black","tag-boys","tag-claiming","tag-farewells","tag-first","tag-for","tag-high","tag-hopes","tag-jackson","tag-napier","tag-national","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-north","tag-nz","tag-palmerston","tag-schoolmates","tag-schools","tag-senior","tag-sports","tag-tall","tag-team","tag-time","tag-title","tag-tournament","tag-years"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}