The Association Underneath the Basketball

Perry Lakes was not a small community Association.

The scale became clearer every day.

Junior domestic basketball alone involved hundreds of teams and more than three thousand registered players.

There were more than four hundred children waiting for opportunities.

There were six domestic clubs, representative teams, NBL1 programs, development pathways, referees, coaches, schools, sponsors, volunteers and multiple venues.

The problem was not demand.

The problem was capacity.

Court capacity.

Referee capacity.

Staff capacity.

Systems capacity.

The Bendat closure made that brutally obvious.

Courts 1 and 2 were unavailable, disrupting dozens of junior games and affecting NBL1 operations.

A court problem became a competition problem, a participant problem and a financial problem all at once.

I started mapping what the Association actually used each week and comparing it with what was booked.

My July notes recorded inconsistencies between court bookings and actual usage. They also recorded meetings with Basketball WA and stadium management, plus contact with schools and venues across the western suburbs.

I wanted a broader footprint.

Lords Recreation Centre could become more than an occasional overflow venue.

John XXIII College presented a possible long-term partnership and even the possibility of a new club or catchment.

I contacted Scotch, PLC, Trinity, St Mary's and others.

The strategic question was simple.

If hundreds of children wanted to play but we had nowhere to put them, how could we create capacity rather than simply administer the shortage?

That was the kind of work I believed a CEO should be doing.

Not only asking how to survive next Saturday.

Asking how to make next year larger than this year.