Sideline Cut: With the early darkness and the autumn comes another basketball season, another Irish winter in which one of the world's most popular games is played out in thundering community halls among a cult following. In Ireland, basketball qualifies as a minority sport and it seems as though it always will, although those of us who love the game are at a loss to understand why.

In the strongholds of north Dublin, there are much worse ways to kill an early Saturday night than to wander along to the gym at St Vincent's or at Tolka to see the local club playing. A 7.30 p.m. throw-in, cheap admission, guaranteed seats and almost always a cracking atmosphere even though the crowds are rarely what they might be and you are still in the pub by 9 o'clock.

Glasnevin seems to have a real community feel to it and given the numbers that were schooled in Vincent's and must have played hoops there over the years, you have to wonder what better things all those alumni have to be doing early on a Saturday night. There are few better scenes in Dublin sport than a local Superleague derby, especially in October and November when all the field sports are reduced to slow moving, muddy parodies of their summer forms. But the teams rarely play in front of the crowds their skills merit.

Like most of the minority sports in Ireland, basketball has survived almost despite itself. To begin with, there are a number of distinct branches. The elite element is the international squad, presently made up of Irish Americans such as Pat Burke and Jimmy Moran.

The sport is played at some level in almost every school in the country and for years it comfortably held ownership of the title, "the fastest growing sport in the land". At the other end of the spectrum is the national league, the highest domestic standard which gets its annual night under lights when RTÉ (for a handsome sum) televise the cup finals each January.

Lurking in between is the disparate environment of local league basketball, the grassroots of Paddy-hoops that contains, pound for pound, the most oddball collection of characters in the country. You will find all manner of humanity playing local league basketball and most of them wear headbands. Beware of those with headbands.

It is reckoned that around 100,000 people play basketball in this country, a healthy enough constituency and yet to neutrals the game is almost invisible, a rumour. The thing is, you can't criticise the parent body, the IBA, in this regard because for the last decade, they have demonstrated a level of initiative and professionalism that leaves the senior sporting bodies in Ireland in the shade.

With the ESB ending its sponsorship, the game is an unlit thing in many regions of the country. Back in the 1980s, it seemed like basketball had made a raid on the national consciousness. Neptune, the once-struggling Cork city club had transformed itself into something impossibly glamorous and big-time, with an atmospheric, two-tiered arena up in the heart of the city and really classy local players like Tom Wilkinson and Tom O'Sullivan.

They had attitude, they had great Americans like Terry Strickland and on Friday nights, they had the public hanging out of the rafters. It was the closest that Irish basketball ever did - or will - get to emulating the legendary green-tinted home of American hoops, the old Boston Garden.

And this, remember, was during a particularly rich period in both Cork hurling and football so it was not as if there was a deficit of other attractions.

Although Neptune will be a force in the coming season, they underwent a slump in the 1990s and have never fully recaptured that trembling, night-to-die-for atmosphere for which those days are recalled. Other clubs have had their own difficulties.

In the northwest, the Sligo All-Stars were forced to bow out of Superleague after a top class involvement spanning 50 years. Their old rivals, Ballina, a famous, family-orientated club also had to drop from the highest tier for three seasons because of financial troubles. Their return this year, led by the ageless Liam McHale, will make the winter much shorter around Mayo.

Like all local clubs, Ballina has had its internal rows and financial woes, but they always seemed like a good prototype for a provincial Irish basketball club, operating in harmony with other sports and drawing on a cross-section of the community for support. It was not uncommon to see well-known Mayo football faces in the crowd at Ballina games.

Indeed, evidence of the influence of basketball thought and theory on the native games has been one of the strange footnotes of the existence of the sport here. At club and county games, you see teams using warm-up drills that are straight out of ancient basketball manuals. The concept of zone defence (i.e. covering an area of the field rather than an opponent) has become accepted. Tyrone manager Mickey Harte has readily declared his affection for the sports philosophy of John Wooden, the legendary, old-world American college coach.

At a press conference recently, Liam McHale agreed he brings some of his basketball knowledge to use in training Mayo's forwards. Basketball contains any number of principals that are universal when it comes to sport. Any decent schools team will be able to switch from at least two-type of zone defences to a man-to-man match up and back again, they will know how to play against the type of defences used on them. They will generally be able to run two or three patterned attacking plays and also a set fast break. They will carry a lot of information and translate that into floor action at top speed. They are generally simple and foolproof and if you learn them, you have a good grounding and generally a good reading on most of the ball sports.

There are good signs for the future. The Ireland men's team can now compete with the better European countries, the sport is huge in schools and the standard is rising. Crowds are on the up. The cup always sells out. As a product, the game is worth sponsoring.

Camaraderie is the reason basketball will never die out in Ireland. It is a positive reflection of both the game and the country that many American players lured over here many moons ago on winter contracts ended up settling down in Ireland, guys like Deora Marsh and Gerome Westbrooks and Kelvin Troy. Scott McCarthy came to play basketball and sight-see a year after graduating from Brown University and ended up as chief executive of the IBA for a number of years. There is a good story told about McCarthy's initiation to Irish basketball in the early 1980s.

Sligo signed him for a year and on the scheduled day two club representatives travelled down to Shannon to meet him off the plane. They waited as the passengers disembarked and nothing resembling a ball player met their eye - McCarthy was described as 6 ft 6 in and blond. After about an hour the arrival hall doors opened and a tiny man in an intimidating white Stetson hat marched through.

"Knowing our luck," hissed one of the Sligo men, "that's our man." Thankfully it wasn't and after another long delay, McCarthy, who got into conversation with immigration, appeared and looked satisfyingly like the real thing. It was five o'clock now and McCarthy was due on court in Sligo at eight. They drove straight to the gym. McCarthy was a very fine player, but on this night, disorientated and exhausted, he was truly terrible.

A bumper crowd turned up to see "the new Yank" and by the half-time, they were thoroughly disenchanted. Sligo were going to start the new season with a loss and the way their new acquisition was playing, it was hard to imagine them winning again.

The Sligo man who had made the journey down to Shannon to collect him shook his head bitterly as McCarthy made his way back the court after another fruitless attack.

"We should have taken the fucker in the Stetson," he said.