Important Announcements & Events

Pending Updates For 2019/2020 Season: As an organization, St. Perpetua CYO is committed to providing a fun experience and fostering the positive development of our players, both as young athletes and individuals. To that end, we are implementing two important changes for the upcoming season.

First, all teams will now share court space and practice with a partner team (in the same grade or skill level). As our program has continued to grow, court space has become an increasing challenge, and by pairing up teams, we achieve several important objectives:

• Kids get more basketball. Practice slots will now be 90 minutes instead of 60, and we can ensure that every team gets two practices per week throughout the season.
• Teams will now have consistent weekly practice times, which will help our families plan and make sure kids can attend.
• It will improve the practice experience by providing the opportunity for combined team drills and full-court scrimmages, which are fun and help build skills.

Second, this year both the NBA and USA Basketball recommended that no zone defense should be played under the age of 12.  

Per the NBA and USA Basketball , "Player-to-player defense encourages more movement, gives more opportunity for physical activity and gives kids the opportunity to learn on-the-ball defense and off-the- ball defense. This is one place our basketball experts were adamant about.”

As an organization, St. Perpetua CYO agrees with the NBA and USA Basketball. We have adopted the recommendations.

Effective in the 2018/19 season, the St. Perpetua basketball teams will not play zone defense through fifth grade.

If you’d like to learn more about the merits of this decision, please see the link to a USA Today article

below.https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2018/03/20/nba-usa-basketball-youth-playing-guidelines- no-zone-lower-rims-no-three-pointers-shot-clock/441134002/

Zone defense has become increasingly popular because it is effective at winning games, and we should note that this is not a league-wide change. While we hope other parishes will join us in adopting these standards, we may win fewer games in the meantime and that’s okay. Our primary consideration in any decision is to do what is the right thing for the kids, and we are entirely confident this change will provide a better basketball experience and develop our kids to be stronger players longer-term.

We hope St. Perpetua families will support us in these changes, and please reach out to any board member if you have questions.