Hi everyone,

I hope you are all having a fantastic weekend and enjoyed our first week of the season proper.

First Weekend of season proper

We had almost 80 teams (some had a bye) playing on Friday night and Saturday, with nearly 800 Rockets children participating in these games. Everything went extremely well, and I couldn't be prouder of our players and parents. It's truly amazing to see how much some of the children have grown since last December.

I did witness some great sportsmanship over the weekend where we had significant victories and I would like to thank the coaches and parents for managing the children in acting the way they did, remembering being humble in victory and gracious in defeat are things we want to teach our children.

Occurrences this week

A couple from occurances from our families and some from other clubs members. I would like everyone to be mindful of things and put everything into perspective.

Some things::

• People telling the referee they are wrong. At what level refereeing do you think the people questioning the referees are – if they are not qualified it is ridiculous them questioning a call or if they are better why they are not out there.

• People going to a score bench bench or questioning a score bench during the game - there are 2 scorers and a referee that check the score each quarter – again those questioning tthe score bench are these people experts . If anyone is annoying the score bench the scorebench cannot do their job so they are causing problems.

• Other sports - Can spectators go to a scorebench at a Badminton Match, a Volleyball game, a representative Basketball game, a Rugby League game a Soccer game and if not then what right has anyone got to do it at a children's basketball game.

This weekend court 1 at Runcorn had a faulty score board Consul and Marsden had a malfunctioning scoreboard but again neither of these things are life changing.

Remember it is children weekend sport, if someone gets it wrong I think children need to know it is not a perfect world and we all make mistakes, it is not at a representative level, not state level, not national. I remember my experiences with the families that travelled overseas with Rockets to Taiwan, not once did any parent act like this and we were playing internationally not children weekend sport.

Couple of special coaches

I will start with Tony Cameron our long time coach who has just been appointed as the QSL Head Coach for 2024. Congratulations Tony we are blessed and privilaged to have you in our club

Mack Utai who took our team to Taiwan in 2023 and went to the Australian titles with the Qld U15 boys team where he was assistant Coach which is truly an amazing thing, he was also appointed the national U16 Somoa Coach in 2023

More coaches news - We currently have 6 external professional coaches that attend and support our club coaches. I will give more information out on this over the coming weeks and please tell your coordinator if you would like them to attend a training session of yours.

Upcoming events & special people

I would like to congratulate Nazeera Khatree who is now part of the Junior representative subcommittee and Lin Ke and Steve Morrison who are on the Domestic sub Committee for our competition. It is wonderful to see people putting so much back into the Basketball community and I know there are so many that do so much and you all do make a difference to so many young lives.

We will be playing a mini tournament against teams from Toowoomba in April and at the end of April we will have a movie day. I will give you the movie and dates next week in the news letter.

Wishing you all a great week ahead, and I look forward to seeing you at the courts.

Best regards,

Mark