Amateur competitions for the 2016-17 season began in the North Basque Country in late September. I will check in with selected competitions when match videos are available. Most of the beginning tournaments are regional in nature. Later in the season the Federation Francais de Pelote Basque (FFPB) national (Championnat de France) and other specialty competitions will begin. The seaon will climax with the FPPB Grand Semaine, a week of multiple tournament finals for all age and talent groups, held mostly outdoors on fronton place libres.
The best place to follow all of these competitions is pelotelive.free.fr. Nowhere else that I know of consolidates the ongoing results of as many competitions. No other BP website I know of is as well organized with so much information. PFF has a very powerful query database that allows interested users to query a competition database for any or all of eight different variables. For those of you just getting started with North Basque pelote sports, the best way to start is to query the entire database by "medias". Select "Videos" and "recherche". You will retrieve competitions in 11 different sports, played on three different kinds of courts, by men and women of different age and talent levels, sponsored by multiple agencies. Click on any "voir" to get to a competition and then look for the film icon. MAKE SURE TO "DESACTIVER" the PFF auto-refresh feature (which is used for keeping up with match point by point scoring) when viewing a match. Otherwise the video will stop. In many cases there are links to Youtube sites of origin for these matches, which you may want to investigate, as the Youtube site may have more exhaustive video coverage of the sport than PFF does. In most, but not all PFF cases where video is available, it is available for finals or semi-finals (at the bottom of each competition list). This is the best way to learn these sports.
For those of you who are familiar with these sports, the best way to find out what is going on is to query the same database by saison (2016-2017). Click on "voir" to see the progress of any competition you are interested in. To obtain more information about an individual competition, simply cut and paste the acronym for the organizer into a search engine. If you don't get what you are looking for, search with the acronym plus "pelote" or "voir" the competition in PFF for the full name of the organizer and query that. The organizer will often have results more quickly than they are available at PFF and you will become familiar with the various organizations.
You will also want to bookmark the national organizing agency for Basque Pelote in the North, FFPB, for information about national competitions. At the site you will find a calendar of national competitions that run from January through June, 2017. Most of these competitions will be covered by PFF but this calendar is essential for those who are interested in staying "ahead of the curve". Results for these competitions will be avialable at the FFPB results database, as well as PFF.
At this time there are match videos available for one sport, Xare. They are provided by the Urrunarrak Pelote Youtube site. Urrunarrak is one of the clubs that plays in the Ligue de Pelote du Pays Basque Championnat du Pays Basque 2017 - Xare - 1ère série (or LPPB Resultats and Classements). Search either for "Trinquete / Xare" and Categorie "1ere Serie - 1.Maila".
MY ARTICLE: My first Xare match.
