46 teams from seventeen countries, including eight Hungarian teams, will participate in the 3×3 European University Basketball Championship starting next Saturday in Debrecen.
The organizers are expecting almost 400 players for the tournament, which will take place between July 15 and 19 in front of the main building of the University of Debrecen (DE) in a real festival atmosphere, which means more than 1,800 guest nights for the city of Cívis.
The title defenders are also coming to the Great Plains, i.e. for women, the Ukrainian Vaszil Sztefanik National Subcarpathian University (whose costs were covered by DE), while for the men, the Lithuanian Vytautas Magnus University.
Eight teams from Hungary submitted their entries. The host University of Debrecen will be interested in both women’s and men’s competitions, as will the Hungarian University of Physical Education and Sports Sciences. The Budapest University of Technology and Economics and Corvinus will start with men’s teams, while István Széchenyi University and Miskolc University will compete in the women’s competition.
“We are expecting 19 women’s and 27 men’s teams for the European Championships. The athletes come from the largest institutions on the continent, so we can expect to see American basketball players who study in Europe,” declared László Balogh, chairman of the organizing committee and director of the DE Sports Science Coordination Institute.
After the opening ceremony next Saturday, the matches will be held from Sunday to the following Wednesday between 9 am and 1 pm and 4 pm and 10 pm every day. The finals start at 20.10 and 20.35 on the closing day. Entry to the event is free, and a stand for six hundred people awaits the fans in front of the DE main building.
The 3×3 university European Championship will also be the last big test competition of the European University Games to be held next summer, which will be jointly hosted by Debrecen and Miskolc. In the city of Cívis, more than two thousand athletes will compete in seven sports (field football, futsal, handball, beach handball, 3×3 basketball, badminton, table tennis).
(MTI)
