City of Saskatoon requests man to remove basketball net from street

Keeping your basketball net out on the street isn’t something you might be able to get away with anymore. 

Derek Watson says he received a by-law notice from the City of Saskatoon that’s asking him to remove his net from the street during certain situations moving forward. 

Watson says he’s been putting his net out on the street for the last seven years and has never had anything close to a problem before until now.

“It can stay out there while someone’s playing, but when they’re finished playing, it has to be removed and put back on my property,” Watson said. 

Moving forward, Watson says this is going to be more of a hassle because of how heavy the net is and the weight that’s used to hold it down. 

“It’s weighted down so that it doesn’t tip over, so to move it in and out of the property is a real pain in the behind,” Watson said. 

Watson would understand if he lived on a busy street with tons of traffic but he says that’s not the case.  

“We’ve got a really quiet street. It’s not like there’s a ton of cars that are parked out there that basketballs could be hitting vehicles. We’ve never had an issue.”

He believes that someone blew the whistle on the operation and the city has no choice but to take action. 

“I’m guessing that there maybe was a complaint that has happened from a neighbour, so I’ll be reaching out to the city to see what we can do about it,” Watson said.

The City of Saskatoon confirmed that Watson’s hunch was correct.

“Enforcement is undertaken on a complaint-driven basis, meaning someone in the community would have filed a complaint with the City that we would have then looked into.

“When a complaint is filed, we would leave a notice with that property owner, indicating that the basketball stand must be removed when it is no longer in use,” the City of Saskatoon said in a release.

Watson says this makes him lose faith in where we’re at as a society.

“We just had kids in COVID lockdown, they’ve been masked up for so long and they spend so much time on screens.

“You want to be able to just give them the opportunity to go outside and get them some fresh air and play some sports with some other friends and we can’t even do that,” Watson said.