Two out of three for basketball

A cool head: Kornelia Semmelink brought her vast experience to the basketball party for the UCT women's second team, helping them overcome UWC in the play-offs and setting up a grudge clash with Montana Vikings in their division finals.

It's not the clean sweep they would probably have hoped for, but the UCT Basketball Club can take pride in the fact that two of its five teams have progressed to the championship finals of the Western Cape Basketball Association (WCBA) season. All five UCT sides had made it into the semi-finals (play-offs), but only the men's first and women's second teams triumphed. Both squads needed just two of their three schedules games to knock out their respective rivals from the University of the Western Cape. In the best-out-of-three finals, which started this past Sunday, October 1, the men played Cats, of the Cape Town campus of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), while the women went toe to toe with Montana Vikings in a repeat of last year's championship line-up. Rock-solid form over the Super League season had the UCT men going into the finals as favourites over Cats. The women, underdogs in their clash, may have a monkey on their back, though. They got the better of Vikings in the first of last year's finals, but slumped over the last two, gifting their rivals the title. They will hope for better in 2005.