Canada Basketball slated to honor St. Stephen

The 2026 inductions to the Canadian Basketball Hall of Fame will take place at the Garcelon Civic Center in St. Stephen on Thursday, August 20. Canada Basketball, the sport's national governing body, will put on this event in partnership with the World's Oldest Basketball Court, the organization behind the plan to turn the world's oldest surviving basketball court, above a commercial building that housed the St. Stephen YMCA in the 1890s, into an $18‑million Canada First Basketball Experience Centre.

The event will mark the first time the Hall of Fame inductions have taken place in Atlantic Canada and only the second time outside Ontario following Vancouver in 2007. The first inductions took place in 1978.

Tickets to the event are long sold out, but fans need not despair. St. Stephen will hold a big outdoor Basketball Block Party at the corner of King Street and Budd Avenue from noon to midnight downtown with food vendors, live music and other entertainment and other activities. There will be guided tours of the World's Oldest Basketball Court building, an autograph‑signing session and much more. Eventually the folks attending the induction formalities will come out to join the fun with their own After Party.

These events will lead off three days of basketball frenzy in western Charlotte County. The fifth annual Archie Celebrity Golf Tournament, a fundraiser in support of the World's Oldest Basketball Court, gets under way the next morning, Friday, August 21, at the Algonquin Golf Course in St. Andrews.

It is called the "Archie" in honour of Lyman Archibald, who came to St. Stephen as general secretary of the local YMCA in 1893 and organized the first basketball game in the Border Town on October 17, according to a yellowed St. Croix Courier article. Archibald learned basketball from James Naismith, who invented the game in the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass., in 1891. St. Stephen does not claim that the world's first basketball game happened here, but the Border Town does have the oldest surviving floor on which it was played.

The frenzy continues to Saturday, August 21, when the World's Oldest Basketball Court, the Southwest Regional Basketball Association and Basketball New Brunswick will host the Legends Jam at St. Stephen High School, bringing together local and national basketball leaders to deliver instruction on skills and drills. The day will wrap up with a half‑court three‑on‑three tournament. Information on registration and fees is available on the World's Oldest Basketball Court website.

The Canadian Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2026 includes athletes Miranda Ayim, Michael Meeks, Jamaal Magloire, Anna Stammberger, Dan Meagher and Teresa Kleindienst, coaches Peter "Doc" Ryan and Dave Smart, official Janice Deakin and builder Dr. Andrew Pipe.