Ice is cool no longer

– Ben Hope
CRANBOURNE Ice Basketball teams will now be known as Cranbourne Cavaliers after the club committee and players decided to take a step away from drug connotations associated with the former title.
Club president Dean Carl said the decision had been in the pipelines for the past year and had now been given the verbal go-ahead by a supportive Victorian Junior Basketball League.
“Our general committee put the idea across to the club and there was a unanimous decision it was time to change the name,” Mr Carl said.
“The drug ‘ice’ is something we don’t want to be associated with.”
Ice is a high purity form of the drug methamphetamine, also known as ‘crystal meth’ that has become more widely available in Australia in recent years.
“When we changed from the Comets to Ice about 10 years ago there wasn’t the degree of media attention on the drug,” Mr Carl said.
The name Cranbourne Cavaliers was decided in a unanimous vote by the club’s representative players.
“We put out a suggestion box for all our representative players and received hundreds of ideas for a new club name before the top five ideas went to a vote.”
“Cranbourne Cavaliers received an overwhelming number of votes from the players. I am happy with it, it rolls off the tongue.”
The Cranbourne Big V side will be the first team to don the new Cavalier uniforms for their inaugural season start this March but Mr Carl said all representative teams would be re-branded before the 2010 season.
“We have a completed uniform design and will release them in time for the Big V side, with the junior teams following suit before their season starts,” Mr Carl said.