Big basketball event retained

A MAJOR basketball tournament that was set to take place in Ballarat this year but had to be cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic have been rescheduled for 2022.

Outgoing Basketball Ballarat head Peter Eddy said the association had been given special consideration to host the 2022 Australian Under-18 Men and Women Basketball Championships as well as the Kevin Coombs Cup at the Ballarat Sports Events Centre.

“We’re absolutely delighted to announce we’ve been able to rescue a major event that we’d lost twice this year,” he said. “Once in April… we thought we’d have them in September, and again, ultimately that got cancelled this year.

“We were fortunate to ask Basketball Australia not go back to tender for 2022, which is the next time they were due. They’ve agreed because of the fact we’ve missed out that.”

With City of Ballarat modelling suggesting the over 8500 visitors due during the eight days of the event, each visitor would contribute $148 per night.

By keeping hold of the tournament, Mr Eddy said that the city could benefit from the influx of visitors and the cash injection was significant.

“The event… has over eight-and-a-half thousand bed nights… It’s $1.26 million worth of economic benefit,” he said. “That’s spread across our community. It’s our retailers, it’s our hospitality, it’s our tourism sector. It’s not just Ballarat but the broader region.”

Sovereign Hill CEO Sara Quon joined Mr Eddy for the announcement agreed that the flow on effect from the tournament was positive for the city.

“Sovereign Hill’s had a long and enduring partnership with Basketball Ballarat and partnership that we really value,” she said.

“That’s about working together as a whole to make sure that Ballarat is a place that can really put its best foot forward for events visitors’, the players themselves and their friends and family.

“We’ve seen at Sovereign Hill that basketball events… bring people into town and spend their time in our hospitality venues. We really value the amount they get out and about.”

With 2020 proving that very little can be taken from granted and there was no 100 per cent guarantee the tournament would take place, Mr Eddy said Basketball Ballarat was working to perfect the things within its control.

That includes focusing on statewide events next year and taking the lessons from those activities into the national titles.

“It’s a real balancing act on what we can control,” he said. “If we were to drop back to stage two [restrictions], what we found in the two weeks we had competition here under what’s called the orange 50 code, we got lot of really positive feedback from health professionals, from council, and from our parents about the safety of bringing kids into the sporting environment.

“The next step would be bringing in people from other regions within Victoria.

“One of the things we looked at in planning as an organisation… was to focus next year on state-based events and even our own June tournament.”

The eight-day 2022 Australian Under-18 Men and Women Basketball Championships, and the Kevin Coombs Cup which is the nation’s top level wheelchair basketball championships, will run from 10 to 17 April 2022.