General Statement
With another season over and done with, we at TIB are already looking forward to the next one as we fully intend to continue what we’ve been doing since Stefaan De Vreese launched ThisIsBasketball back in 2003. Since 2012 I have joined Stefaan’s effort and have been responsible for the large majority of all our online content, as well as our entire database on the website with all the team pages, player pages and all the stats from the Belgian 1st Division. Later on we further expanded and I also added TDM1 and TDW1 to our site.
Unfortunately, having 46 seasons of Belgian Basketball stored on our website tends to make our database quite large and – combined with all the articles we’ve published over the years – we quickly started running out of hosting space. Since both Stefaan and me have full-time jobs unrelated to TIB and don’t actually make any money from this, we obviously have a limited budget to invest in TIB. So, when we eventually ran out of hosting space with no budget to increase it, our website was no longer fully functional for pretty much an entire season.
We managed to fix those issues just in time to be able to cover the entire season, but some of our loyal followers will have probably noticed that we did publish a lot less content on our website and that Top Division Women 1 has disappeared completely. This is a deliberate choice that we’ve made to avoid running into hosting issues again. It’s also for this reason that (atleast for now) we won’t be able to add TDM2 on our website.
Having said that, we will continue to cover all these leagues (TDM2 & TDW1 included) but we’ll publish the daily news and small articles only on our Social Media Channels, while on our website we’ll focus on the database and will continue to add the games/results/stats/teams/players from the BNXT League, National Team, National Youth Teams, TDM1 and all the Belgians abroad (pro and US college) along with the occasional long-form article throughout the upcoming seasons.
If you don’t want to miss any of our content then do yourself (and us) a favor and head over to one of our Social Media Channels by clicking on their logo and give us a like/follow if you haven’t already. We currently have a fun Top 100 Power Ranking going on in which we look back at some of the players who’ve had the best career in our Belgian 1st Division these past 46 seasons. Our Power Ranking is not intended to be seen as a list of who the best player in Belgium is (which in my opinion would be an impossible and completely subjective effort), but rather a Top 100 of who had the best career in Belgium based on their personal stats and their personal- and team awards. It’s a fun way to keep us active during the off-season but above all it’s a great way to take a nostalgic look back on the past and at the same time introduce some of these players to the younger generations.
Hopefully you guys appreciate our content and support what we’re trying to do with TIB, which is ultimately to just put Belgian Basketball in the spotlight and provide extra coverage next to the leagues/federations/teams’ official channels.
If anyone is interested in occasionally contributing articles about anything related to Belgian Basketball or has some news from any of the leagues/players we follow that you’d like to see on our channels, feel free to contact us by mail at hello@thisisbasketball.be or send us a private message on our socials.
Ads for basketball apparel or any other commercial business will get blocked.
Sincerely,
Sven De Bolster.
