About
About Us
Interbasket is an international basketball news website and popular discussion forum. Interbasket exists as a basketball community for the entire world, and encourages personal awareness of basketball around the globe, not just for one’s country or region. InterBasket hopes are to facilitate understanding and discussion for basketball on a global scale. No longer is basketball an American thing, but is a world sport that should be respected throughout.
History
InterBasket began in August 2003, but saw much more humble beginnings way back in July of 2001 as a Arvydas Sabonis Yahoo Group (link). I created the group so that fans of the great Lithuanian center could all gather in one common place to discuss anything and everything about the European legend.
Rough Beginnings
It was essentially myself and Janis (Crazy Fan From Idaho) posting responses to each other’s threads. A kid with the username Young Sabas introduced himself, and showed up here and there, but it was just Janis and I for the first year — chatting with each other over Yahoo’s archaic message board.
Around September of 2002 (14 months after our start) - some new faces started to show up on a regular basis — mayteromanl, smoovepersian, ripct78, carolinakid247, and Robert Kremers (creator of the Sabas4MVP site). In mid-2003 we got more great momentum. The group was growing with newer members from all around the world (hooferguy, osurahrah, almkiv, zalgirio_fanas, blackasfualt, mvblair, and kkasperavicius)
Started Out as a Thread
In mid-2003, I began seeing more and more international posters signing up for the Yahoo group. I thought to myself If there are so many people that want to talk about Arvydas Sabonis, why not Peja Stojakovic or Dirk Nowitzki.
So I started a thread to gauge the interest in an international basketball forum. At the same time, I was a regular poster on basketballboards.net (now basketballforum.com) and saw that although it was a huge basketball website, it neglected a huge group of people (uh, anyone outside of the US). Though neglected, those members remained. Basketball fans are basketball fans, even though they weren’t getting the information/discussion they wanted.
One of the more passionate yet easy-going members, MVBlair, saw my thread and urged me to go and do it. MVBlair wouldn’t drop the subject.
InterBasket Beta
In mid-August, I started putting my thoughts to paper and structuring the site in my head. Looking back, it was the right time to start such a forum; with the explosion of international players succeeding in the NBA. I began to dabble around with different types of discussion forums. I came up with a name; an unfortunate-acronym- IBPNF, the International Basketball Players Network and Forum (or something like that). I knew that wouldn’t work out in the long run, so I was lucky to run across the name — Interbasket.net which stood for the International Basketball Network. Perfect.
In the vein of my sabonis group, I decided that each country would have a forum, and it would be named after a current player - i.e. Dirk Nowitzki and Germany.
Now the Most Important Part - the People.
I immediately started transitioning my Sabonis Yahoo Group into this new forum and asked the members to make the move. I was lucky to have most of them join. Many of those same members are still active at Interbasket today.
Crazy Fan From Idaho (USA), mayteromanl (Spain) and almkiv a.ka. Zalgirinis (Lithuania) eventually became the site’s first moderators. MVBlair eventually became the one and only other administrator to date. Another important member from thos days was Zalgirio_fanas, some of you know him better as Marius123.
It was a nice start for Interbasket to already have dedicated fans. However, though we would have no trouble with the Sabonis/Lithuania forum, in order to get a full forum that covered the entire world running, the site would need more members and exposure. A few of us at IBN started to recruit. Luckily for Interbasket, our first recruiting efforts brought it some great members - Matiz, ostend, Srle, SEOK, Hagakure, Juan Carlos Nadal, Fiona (aka NaF), J-Will2, EverGreen, kestas, and Epadfield all in the first two months.
Since then Interbasket has really epitomized what we proposed in our small Yahoo Group 5 years ago - a truly international basketball forum. Some names that need mentioning - sinobball, sariss, Jokinen, K2, Trifilli, joker, Ballstorm, rikhardur, wardjdim, C-ka, BBallfanJ, FRANKY 13, ziv, DanMajerle, Saskibaloia, and worldbasketball. Sorry if I forgot anyone.
I want to give a special thank you to the following members - Crazy Fan From Idaho and mvblair (come back both of you!) - Interbasket wouldn’t exist without both of your commitments early on. Dear Juan Carlos Nadal, NaF, Matiz, and mayteromanl — without you guys, this site wouldn’t be where we are today.
Truly, without the members of this site — what good is the earth with no people to inhabit it?
