On Saturday, March 9, the fourth season of the Basketball Africa League (BAL) will tip off in Pretoria, South Africa. The continental event, jointly organized by NBA Africa and world basketball body FIBA, has quickly established itself as the highest level of basketball competition in Africa. In a bid to keep raising the bar, there’s a notable expansion.

When 2022 BAL runner-up Petro De Luanda (Angola) plays first-time BAL participant, Morocco’s FUS Rabat Basketball, it will not only be the first BAL game to be held in South Africa, it will also be the first game played in a new conference. After two years of placing the twelve qualifying teams into two conferences, Sahara and Nile, the league now has a third conference, Kalahari.

In addition to the two teams kicking off the season, the Kalahari conference includes the home team, Cape Town Tigers, and the first team from Burundi to participate in the BAL, Dynamo Basketball Club. Of the four teams in the Kalahari conference, Dynamo had to grind its way into the final twelve of this year’s BAL, only making it into the Elite 16 qualifying competition as a wildcard team and winning a crunchtime game against Tanzania’s Pazi Basketball Club to clinch its spot.

“We came to the ELITE 16 to try to become the first Burundian team to bear the name of the country in a competition as prestigious as the BAL, and we succeeded,” Yves Nzeyimana, Dynamo’s team manager, tells OkayAfrica. “I believe our participation in the BAL will be a unique experience to try to surpass ourselves and try to show the world that there is basketball in Burundi.”

Promotional image for Basketball Africa League.

There are no expectations of Dynamo going into the group phase, where all teams play each other twice for seeding spots. The first two seeded teams qualify for the playoffs, while the two best third-place teams from all three conferences will join as wildcards. Picking up the top seeds ahead of returnees Petro De Luanda and Cape Town Tigers is a tall order, and snagging the third spot ahead of FUS Rabat — who had a smoother route to qualifying — will also be a difficult task.

For Nzeyimana, playing at BAL is about competing at a high level, and seeing how the results shakeout. The stakes are much different for Sahara conference team, Rivers Hoopers. The Nigerian team is making a BAL return after competing in the debut season back in 2021. In-fighting in the Nigerian Basketball Federation ruled the team out of returning to the league in 2022, while Kwara Falcons represented Nigeria last year.

“We have a target as a team,” Queen John-Moseph, Rivers Hoopers media manager, tells OkayAfrica. “This time our target is to qualify out of our conference and get to the playoffs,” adding that Nigeria has yet to be represented in the elimination phase of BAL. “When we get to the playoffs, we’ll set another target.”

To reach that goal, Rivers Hoopers will have to qualify from a group that includes 2022 champions, US Monastir (Tunisia), last year’s runner-up and home team, AS Douanes (Senegal), and Rwanda’s APR Basketball, who are appearing in the competition for the first time and have the added motivation of potentially playing in the playoffs on home turf. All four automatically qualified teams will fight for seeding during group games at the Dakar Arena in Senegal’s capital city, from May 4 to May 12.

In between the Kalahari and Sahara conference group games, the Nile conference games will take place from April 19 to April 27, inside Cairo’s Hassan Mostafa Indoor Sports Complex. The conference includes BAL defending champion and home team, Al Ahly, consecutive participants City Oilers (Uganda), and two first-time BAL contenders, Al Alhy Ly from Libya and Central African Republic’s Bangui Sporting Club.

In an expanded format, 48 total games will be played in this year’s BAL, across four months and four countries. The final playoff rounds will return to the BK Arena in Kigali, Rwanda, in late May. “We are thrilled to play the first BAL games in Pretoria, South Africa and to return to Dakar, Cairo and Kigali, where we’ve seen tremendous fan engagement over the past three seasons,” BAL President Amadou Gallo Fall said in a press statement in January.

The expansion is clearly cause for excitement as the league looks to further strengthen its popularity amongst Africans. “I think it’s good for development,” John-Moseph says of this year’s BAL schedule. “It’s also good for competition, and it also spreads it across more countries. I think it will be good for fans to watch and participate in the league.”