Georgetown Female Basketball Team Wins DFI Basketball Tournament; To Play With the Stars of ‘Slam Dunk’ Documentary Being Shown at DTFF

Avenging the league-stage loss to the eventual finalists, the female basketball team of Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar (SFS-Qatar) won a Doha Film Institute-sponsored basketball tournament over the weekend.

Held at the Education City Student Center, the tournament saw five of Doha’s leading female basketball teams – representing SFS-Qatar, Northwestern University in Qatar, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar and Texas A&M at Qatar – compete with each other with the winners moving forward to knock out stages through games that featured extremely tight scores.

The final was between Northwestern Wildcats and Georgetown. In the earlier stage of the tournament, Wildcats beat Georgetown by just one point. The final was closely-fought and had a dramatic end as in the dying seconds the Wildcats were awarded a penalty which failed to materialize. At the end Georgetown won 12 to 11.

The prizes for winning the DFI tournament were red carpet tickets for the opening of Doha Tribeca Film Festival as well as playing in a friendly tournament against the Qatar Women’s Basketball club and the stars from the documentary film “Salaam Dunk” that will be shown at the festival.

The tournament will take place on October 26 (Wednesday) at the Women’s Sports Hall at Aspire Zone at 5.30pm.Salaam Dunk is a documentary about a group of basketball playing girls in Iraq and how they used basketball to get over the hardships they faced.

“To play the Iraqi team… that’s a great opportunity because we get to interact with people from a very different country and how they empowered themselves in order to create a team and play together. I think that’s a huge thing,” said Talah Hammash of the winning team.

“The adrenaline one gets when they work as a team defeats any loss or victory,” said another team member, Danah Dehdary.The winning SFS-Qatar team was comprised of seven women who signed up to the invitation. There was no selection process. These were Ashley Littleton, Danah Dehdary, Dima Wahbeh, Tala Hammash, Samantha Smith, Arwa El Sanosi and Gabriella Zoia.