Basketball infrastructure concerns as sport rises in popularity

Australia Broadcast Center

08-07-2025

Fifteen-year-old Emma Quinlan from Shepparton started playing basketball after the COVID-19 pandemic and now travels to compete for the North East Bushrangers in the Victorian Junior Basketball League (VJBL) every week.
She has also taken on assistant coaching roles with a mentor and aspires to coach full-time in the future.
There are local academy programs, but Emma must regularly travel to Melbourne and Bendigo for better training opportunities.
"For me, basketball is all about the relationships that I can make," she said.
Emma's family is deeply involved in the sport — her mum, Sam Quinlan, coaches multiple teams in the area and her brother, Reese, has played since 2012 and coaches in the VJBL.
Ms Quinlan said infrastructure in the area was lagging behind the interest in basketball.
"The Mooroopna Cats are at a very, very old facility," she said.
"It's cold, it's dank and has a linoleum floor that's been there since the 1990s."
Wangaratta's basketball association recently relocated its under-12 and under-14 tournaments to Wodonga due to a lack of suitable courts to accommodate the area's 70 teams at the town's sports and aquatic centre.
The venue hosted an NBL match in August last year and received a $12.4 million upgrade for the facility, but it was not sufficiently complete to host the junior competition.
"There was a little bit of the stadium that wasn't finished, and that was the toilets and things like that," Wangaratta Basketball president Adam Maher said.
"There wasn't an easy way out of it until we did some more work with our council, so until we sort out those issues, we thought it was a better idea to go up to Wodonga."
Former Opal Lauren Jackson recently led training clinics across Australia and said she was concerned about the lack of courts for youth basketball.
"The more I talk to the states and territories, the more that you hear stories of kids having to be turned away from the game," she told the ABC while conducting training sessions in April.
Despite the challenges, Basketball NSW and Basketball Victoria said they were not sitting idle.
Both associations said they were working to meet the growing demand.
Basketball NSW said the state needed 300 courts, and 54 were in the pipeline.
The Victorian government is either building or upgrading 16 courts through its Regional Sports Infrastructure Program announced in July 2023 after the 2026 Commonwealth Games were cancelled.
The government also allocated $800,000 to East Gippsland Council in its 2023 budget for upgrades to the basketball precinct at Lakes Entrance.
But Basketball Victoria general manager of government, strategy and innovation Jake Keogh said the state was 220 courts short of the number required.
"We have a strategic growth target of 4 per cent a year, which will mean we need 22 to 24 new courts a year," he said.
Mr Keogh said initiatives were helping to attract more players to the sport, including organising more 3x3 street basketball tournaments, working with other sports such as netball to share courts, and delivering stripped-back facilities that were cheaper to build, such as the AWA stadium in Geelong.
A state government spokesperson said more than $80 million had been invested in basketball infrastructure projects in regional areas.
"Councils are encouraged to apply for funding from our dedicated grants programs that support building and upgrading of basketball facilities across Victoria," the spokesperson said.
But regional councils said they were scrambling for scarce funding at best.
Greater Shepparton City Council said it had campaigned for more funding from the Commonwealth ahead of the federal election and would continue to upgrade its sports stadium.
The Victorian government pledged $3 million towards the project.
The second stage of upgrades to the Lauren Jackson Sports Centre in Albury has stalled amid funding uncertainty. In the latest budget handed down in June, Albury City Council announced that the stage two upgrade would remain unfunded until at least 2029.
A response to submissions in council papers said that was due to financial sustainability measures and competing project priorities, but the decision could be reviewed annually.
Despite some of the issues, Mr Maher said the Wangaratta stadium was getting the improvements it needed, but would require more resources for completion.
"The council have produced four new courts and we have people coming down all the time saying it's a fantastic facility," he said.
"The council do recognise the facility needs more toilets … there's plumbing done, ready to go, but we obviously need to find some money to get to the next thing."