Kia ora, I have been a part of basketball here for the past 15 years — first following my husband in the senior men’s division and then our children aged 10-19 throughout school/local club and representative basketball. You could say we are 100 percent a basketball family.
Mentioning family, like hockey in Gisborne, basketball is made up of a smaller community that is very tight and working hard to keep the sport strong and thriving here. We have relied on key people like Dwayne Tamatea to continually push and volunteer heavy hours to the sport.
The fruits of this are in full fruition now, as the past few years have shown continuous growth year after year — with a doubling and tripling in players showing up for trials, resulting in multiple teams in regional competitions.
Basketball is at what I would say is a peak in our community and an indoor sports centre would have a huge impact on how we support this growth.
I could give a million reasons why this is needed: we need a facility to host competitions; to be available to all to train for representative tournaments; we need a facility to run local competitions; to increase participation; to increase training and skill; to have courts available to play basketball in any capacity, because other than school gyms (which I will add are mostly unavailable to the public), we have one court at one gym that costs a lot to hire —which leaves nowhere to just play the game!!
