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The Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamat is gearing up for its International Ahmadiyya basketball Cup. 

The tournament and International Invitational will take place this weekend. It hosts five categories and even welcomes teams coming from Chetumal.

We spoke to the the group's National President earlier today and he says that while the tournament is a new event, the players ahem enough league experience to handle it: 

Naveed Mangala - National President, Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamat of Belize
"The Ahmiddya basketball league came into being about six years ago and we will be starting out a sixth season of the league at the end of January. So the whole idea behind this was that we didn't have anything going on for the youth. We had a lot of kids that were playing basketball but there was nothing organized. So we, by the grace of God are humbled that we were able to start this and we started off with maybe sixty or seventy kids in Belize City and now after six years of it is the biggest youth league in the country. This weekend what we're doing is called the international Ahhmidya basketball cup It's the first time that we're trying this and the whole purpose of this is that instead of the three months league we do a tournament just for one weekend and we have five different categories starting from U-13 all the way to U-19 and we have an open category for men also And we believe that what's missing in the country is the talent that the girls have to offer so that's why we added two categories for the girls also."

"There's two aspects of religion number one is to serve God almighty and number two is to serve mankind, so the Ahhmidya Muslim Jamat whenever we do these humanitarian services we do it without any strings attached. We do it to serve mankind so this was not meant to be for Muslims as such this was Muslims trying to say that look we are part of this society and we feel that this is important to offer our services to the society."

The cup starts tomorrow and games will be played throughout the weekend, with the finals taking place Sunday at the Civic Center starting at 9 a.m.