PLANS FOR THE FUTURE
Hills Hornets are the largest basketball association in NSW and we cater for 10,000 registered members annually and host over 20,000 visitors to our venue each week. We pride ourselves on the community we’ve built from the ground up, however our growth means that we are not always able to meet the overwhelming demand for Basketball in the area.
With many people missing out and expressing their frustration to us, we wanted to take the opportunity to provide the full picture. While we provide the largest local competition and the largest skills academy in the state by a large margin, the reality is that our facilities fall way short of demand. As a result, available places sell out quickly, our waitlists are long and unfortunately, many people miss out.
We are often asked why we don’t simply roll participants over at the end of each term and the bottom line is fairness. A pure business decision would see us choose this option however we proudly remain a not-for-profit, community organisation and as such, we need to give the wider public access rather than acting as an exclusive club. We value wider participation over dollars.
In 2020, we took on the Bernie Mullane Sports Complex to help address this issue however, almost immediately, we found ourselves oversubscribed again. This shows the overwhelming interest in the sport and we remain committed to continuing to do our best to create a fair and inclusive process for our community. We value your patronage and whilst we’re unable to accommodate everyone in the Winter competition and latest term of skills, we would like to keep everyone involved and engaged with the association as much as possible. To that end, we are working through several additional opportunities for waitlisted teams and will advise as soon as details are locked in.
Please be assured that we continue to work behind the scenes on the ultimate solution of securing more courts. Unfortunately, we’ve recently learnt that we were unsuccessful in our WestInvest application which would have added an additional 3 courts at Bernie Mullane however we are now back banging on the doors of Council and State and Federal Government, as this is a project the community desperately needs.
If you would like to be part of this wider view solution, you might consider contacting our Federal Member Alex Hawke, State Representatives Ray Williams and Mark Hodges or The Hills Shire Council. It is important to ensure they know how under resourced the sport of Basketball is in our area.
