The new Island Basketball Summer League tips off at Somersfield Academy tonight — and it promises to showcase some of the most dynamic hoops Bermuda has seen.

Cecil Hendrickson, the secretary general of the Bermuda Basketball Association, described the league as being like the “Wild West”, with the competition being supplanted by college and high-school players returning from overseas in the “ultimate bragging rights league”.

With the BBA’s Elite City League and Island Basketball League being based around drafts and with player restrictions to keep them more competitive, the summer league is a more fun, “free-for-all”.

“I think of summer league as being like the Wild West,” Hendrickson said. “Everyone’s coming back into Dodge City.

“All the trash talking is happening during the course of the year. [In] some of the other leagues, you get a lot of people saying: ‘Well, if I was down there it wouldn’t have went down like that’ and ‘if I was playing with this team, y’all wouldn’t have won that’. So this league gives you the opportunity to come in and ‘put your money where your mouth is’.

“This gives guys the chance to play who they want to play with and to be able to say ‘we are the best’. So this is the ultimate bragging rights league. So you get together and when you walk away you can say we are definitively ‘the best team that could be put together in basketball in Bermuda’.

“In the other leagues, you level them out a bit more. The Elite City League has a fantasy draft where, if you’re smart, you’re drafting best available player or best player who will fit in your system. So there are a lot more levels to that.”

The summer league will be boosted by returning players from overseas, including the likes of Omari Dill-Pettiford, who will be playing for the Twisters, having just completed his sophomore season at Wilmington University, of NCAA Division II. The 6ft 3in guard averaged 12.2 points per game for the Wildcats — who are based in New Castle, Delaware — and shot 31.1 per cent from three-point range.

“Summer has traditionally been a time where we have more folk that are coming back from the different high schools, colleges or whatever the case may be,” Hendrickson said. “What we thought about was that a league like what was the Elite City League, which was limiting in the numbers because you are trying to keep a certain level of play, and basketball IQ per team and excitement for the fans, leaves a lot of folk kind of out in the cold in the summertime. When some of the players who are out there on scholarships come back, they will supplant players who have playing in the winter leagues or the fall leagues.

“So the leagues committee started up the summer league, which is basically ‘play with whoever you want’. What we found out is for the membership want to play in different styles. Some members don’t necessarily like the ‘draft’ style, but I feel like the draft style offers a better ‘fan experience’ because with that, people are picking what they consider to be the best possible teams without the best players coming together and playing on one team.

“Each league is going to cater to a different design and dynamic, so I think the summer league caters to the bulk of the membership, which will also bring out more fans for basketball. The younger players coming back will bring their families out, and the older players’ families will come out as well. And the more basketball that is played, the more exposure it can get and the more coverage it might be able to get, the more people will realise, hey, there is actually basketball being played in Bermuda. It’s amazing how many people I run into on a year-by-year basis that don’t even realise basketball is being played in Bermuda at all, let alone as an organised league structure.

“You have groups of guys who like to play together, groups of guys who have played together for years, you’ve got young guys who are coming up who just want to keep it together. The restrictions in other leagues mean that you have to play for the team who drafts you. This league, we felt, would be a good change of pace and to give the membership the ability to just put a team together and have some fun during the summer, while everyone’s trying to go to the beach and things like that, so that, for example, if some of the guys are at a barbecue or something like that, the other guys on the team can still play.

“We’re hoping that by having three similar but structurally different leagues, that will allow for three different fan experiences throughout the year.”

Dill-Pettiford will be bringing his skills back to the island, starting tonight, when his Twisters tipoff the campaign against Crossfire at 6.30pm at Somersfield Academy, with the Thundercats taking on Skyforce at 7.45.

“Omari Dill-Pettiford is a really talented young player,” Hendrickson said. “He has a lot of all-around skill. He’s a very good offensive player. He’s strong. Sometimes he might make a few youthful mistakes, but that just comes with youth. As far as his two-way ability to play offence and defence, in the ECL, he beat the eventual champions almost single-handedly.

“There are about six or seven [players] coming back [from overseas]. It adds a little boost to what’s happening. One of the things that we like is that whenever they come back they bring knowledge that they’ve picked up when they’ve been abroad, so that when they come in, they may have left as one thing and come back as something else, or more than that. Most of the guys in our leagues have been playing in college or have been playing in our leagues a long time.”

Games will be held three days a week on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday until July 23.

Each team will be showcased on the IBL Facebook Page and the Bermuda Basketball Association webpage (www.bermudabasketball.net). For more details visit www.bermudabasketball.net or e-mail the League/Tournament Committee at soonenough03@gmail.com/lamumbatucker@gmail.com.