MELBOURNE (Paulo Kennedy’s View from Downunder) - Have you ever heard the line about how basketball in Australia is in great shape, it’s just the NBL that’s struggling?

It’s a comforting thought – those rich guys who own the league can’t get it right but the sport is flying – but in many ways it’s a myth.

Sure, lots of kids play the sport. Hundreds of thousands in fact.

Certainly, at all levels our national teams perform very well on the international stage. In fact with the exception of our senior men’s team they perform exceptionally well.

No doubt, basketball touches lots of people’s lives Downunder – players, parents, coaches, referees and volunteers.

These are clear strengths, which few if any other Aussie sports can match, but if you actually analyse basketball in Australia it is a fractured sport.

Fractured at state and association level, and fractured from the commercial world that could tap into the enormous market that can be found within the walls of hundreds of basketball stadiums around the country.

Depending on who you ask, somewhere around one million people play basketball in Australia, yet we have a governing body largely dependent on government funding, national professional leagues almost entirely dependent on rich benefactors, and local associations precariously dependent on sometimes-exorbitant fees charged to players and their families.

The only other sport of note that is in such a dependent financial state is hockey.

We all know professional club owners ask themselves whether they're getting value for money from time to time, but I wonder how often government and parents are doing the same?

Yes, basketball definitely delivers the benefits of physical activity, but it misses the mark with one of the benefits other sports provide.

Where Australian rules football, the rugby codes, soccer and cricket often provide kids exposure to a true club environment, basketball has evolved as the ‘slam bam thank you ma’am’ of Australian sport.

Players come and go every hour, not engaged in a broader club, concerned only with their 40 minutes on court. While this is understandable for casual domestic competitions, perhaps even desirable, at the representative level it is a major failing.

In some major cities, we have a Friday night representative system that forces parents to drive across town in all kinds of traffic at the end of the week, discouraging retention.

These junior competitions operate in almost complete isolation from each club’s senior representative teams, stripping away role models and a pathway to adult basketball.

When the senior teams play on the weekend there are often very few juniors in attendance, with many clubs having to roster designated junior teams to get any sort of buy-in.

Not surprisingly, as young hoopsters reach the end of their junior years many drift away to other sports, possibly still playing casually once a week but dedicating themselves elsewhere.

In the southern states, it’s not uncommon to hear a basketballer who has switched to footy comment that they feel part of a real club for the first time.

While governments may wonder whether they are getting value for money, they should definitely be asking why there is so little private investment in such a major sport.

Local associations battle hard to get businesses on board, but few have the resources to achieve the sort of quality partnerships that deliver a genuine return to sponsors, and hence those that stay long-term are mostly benevolent supporters of the sport.

As for bigger businesses who might want to invest in basketball overall and reach the masses who are involved in hoops, there has never been a coordinated approach to make it easy for large-scale sponsors.

Basketball Australia has long coveted a national database of participants, but now they have finally developed one their efforts to utilise it are sadly being frustrated by some associations.

Look at NAB’s support of Auskick, there is no reason basketball should not have a major grassroots sponsor whose brand is present in every stadium and on every Aussie Hoops uniform.

But no organisation in Australian basketball can coordinate this, and the organisations who could do it together have not done so.

Sadly, when you go into most local basketball stadiums there is no way of knowing which of their juniors graduated to represent Australia or play in the NCAA, NBL or WNBL, nor which of their junior teams achieved state or national success.

There is little or no feel for the history of most of these associations, nothing to draw people into the club. It’s slam bam thank you ma’am for paying your child’s registration fees.

The focus appears to be on getting players in and out in 45 minutes, but successful businesses now look at how they can engage their customers longer.

Why spend all your time and effort attracting new customers when you can build a stronger rapport with those who already know your product? They will become your marketing department.

In the local sense for basketball, that’s about building genuine clubs that people want to be a part of over their lifetime, not just for a season, a period of their childhood or a Wednesday evening.

In the broader sense it’s about creating opportunities for businesses to reach the basketball community both physically in the stadiums and electronically after they’ve walked out the doors.

It’s also about creating a self-sustaining economy, so when one part of the basketball industry is successful it generates benefits for another.

A strong junior club should lead to a strong senior club and vice versa through family links.

More participants should mean more supporters for professional and national teams.

A recognisable NBL club should lead to more revenue-raising opportunities for local clubs.

Businesses who invest in the sport should be able to reach people at all the above-mentioned levels.

The result of increased business involvement should be decreased costs for participants and an increase in retention.

I’m not suggesting achieving any this is easy, but it’s not complex either, it just needs leaders prepared to work together. I’ll talk about that next week.

At the moment though, basketball in Australia is like a one-legged duck, swimming around in circles. The numbers are strong, but there is little genuine growth and the participants of today have often moved on by tomorrow.

Our great success in some areas comes despite our great failings in others, and we should stop trying to hide that and start trying to fix it.

Paulo Kennedy

FIBA

FIBA's columnists write on a wide range of topics relating to basketball that are of interest to them. The opinions they express are their own and in no way reflect those of FIBA.

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