Basketball Blues

Dear Sir,—We would like to draw the attention of the students of this college to the present unsatisfactory method of awarding Blues.

The Blues Committee have advised us that we have been awarded three blues for the 1947 season. Performances are the only definite values from which a sports club can be assessed, and so we have included a short summary of the "A" team's performances throughout the past season.

			Points
	P	W	L	For	Agst.
Wellington competitions	22	16	6	387	296
Tournament	5	5	0	207	141
Total	27	21	6	594	437

Also five players were selected for NZU teams and four were selected for Wellington representative teams. Of the five NZU Blues awarded in basketball last year two were awarded to Victoria.

Surely such a record merits more than three Blues.

Seven members of the OU team gained College Blues last year. This team incidentally was soundly beaten by VUC at last Winter Tournament.

Another point that puzzles us is this:

As basketball is a team game and the success or failure depends on every player, we sent our nominations in alphabetical order and not in order of merit, also we were not able to send a delegate to the Blues Committee meeting as the notification of the meeting was sent to our former secretary's home in Rotorua and was received by us too late to arrange for a suitable delegate to be present.

Thirdly, none of the Blues Committee have watched our team in action. How then did the Blues Committee select three names from our list of nominations? Was it by the turn of a coin?

We hear so much about Victoria's penchant for Tournament wooden spoons and we would point out that we, did our share towards winning the trophy at the other end of the scale of points. How many of the other sports clubs with high proportions of blues achieved a similar feat? As a step towards raising the standard of Victoria's representatives at future Tournaments we would suggest that Blues be awarded to those clubs whose results show that Blues are well merited and not to those clubs which are most esteemed by the Blues Committee.