Great Yarmouth Basketball has taken another big step in its development.

The club was nominated for the Community Club of the Year award at the Norfolk Sports Awards, with club chairman James Long among those attending the awards ceremony at Open in Norwich last week.

Attleborough Boxing Club beat GY Basketball and Norwich Dragons Hockey Club to the award but Long said the nomination itself was a notable achievement.

“There’s been basketball clubs in Yarmouth for donkeys years but our club in particular only started up about 18 months ago,” he explained.

“We have several sides, we play primarily in the Norfolk Basketball League, where we have a men’s senior side, but over the last 18 months we’ve spent a lot of time bringing through juniors as well.

“So we have two junior teams, we run under-17 and under-13 sessions as well and over the last 12 months we’ve done a lot of charity initiatives, we held a sports day for Sport Relief, we’ve done a fair bit of work outside on the courts in the borough, putting up new nets and trying to get people involved.”

The club play their home games at the Marina Centre but try to use courts around the area for their sessions.

They hope to continue to grow, with plans also being made for a sponsored match against a team from Yarmouth’s twinned French town Rambouillet in aid of Red Nose Day.

“The interesting thing as far as the kids are concerned is, there are so many kids that play basketball in school in particular, but no-one really knows where you go from there,” Long added.

“Surprisingly there’s actually quite a few clubs in Norfolk and there is a Norfolk league but it’s not desperately well advertised. So what we’ve been doing is we’ve had our coaches going into schools, speaking to kids about basketball, running sessions that they can come along to and off the back of that about a month ago for the first time in six or seven years we actually have juniors from Yarmouth in the Norfolk squads, which is brilliant.”

For more information, go to facebook.com/GreatYarmouthBasketball