Hi everyone,

What a much better weekend of basketball. The level of competition you experienced on the weekend is exactly what we’ll see throughout the season, and as mentioned at the Grading Day, this year is a full season of assessment for coaches and coordinators.

With no finals, you may see some player or team adjustments over the next few weeks as we continue shaping the best development pathways for everyone preparing for the Winter Season.

Calamvale Courts

We’re hopeful the court issues at Calamvale will be sorted early in the week so we can get everything back to normal.

Overseas Tours

Our China teams are officially underway and have started training. I have been working closely with the Foreign Affairs Office and the team will be meeting the Consular General of China and his office will be supporting us with an activity before we depart — what a great opportunity for our players and travelling families to meet the Consular General.

Expressions of interest for our September Taiwan trip will be sent out at the end of the month. The Taiwan trip the players will be much younger than China.

We’re also lining up games with two New Zealand teams (U14 and U18) for the first week of April, and in May we’ll host a mini tournament with a club from Southern Districts. Lots of exciting international and interstate basketball ahead.

Movie Day

We’ll meet this week to check what’s currently showing in the cinemas. If nothing suitable is available, we’ll shift our movie day to Term 2 — still plenty of fun on the way.

Queensland Club Champions

Some huge news: Basketball Queensland contacted us on Wednesday to let us know we’ve been awarded the 2025 Club Champion title — for the second year in a row we have won this. An incredible achievement for our entire club not just thoes that played as it shows the strenght of the club you are part of.

Here’s a quick snapshot of how it works:

• Clubs compete statewide using only their own registered players.

• The competition includes U12 and older, boys and girls age groups.

• Divisions 2 and 3 teams have capped points, while Division 1 has no capped points allowing clubs to field their strongest possible teams in Div 1.

This is very different from our regular weekly club competition where each team can only have up to 3 representative Division 1 players. For example, the current U16 Division 1 rep team has 8 Rockets players, because of this the players must be split across three different teams in our club competition which demonstrates how strong the club is.

At the Queensland Club Championships, we finally get to showcase our true depth and strength— and it showed. We finished more than 120 points ahead of the next club. That margin speaks volumes about the talent, commitment, and development happening across our program.

A massive thank you to all our coaches and to our professional coaching staff for the work they put in every week. This achievement belongs to all of them as well as the players and the mums and dads for bring them to training and games.

Personal Singlets

We’re moving towards everyone having their own personal singlets, our preference is to have surname on the singlet. All singlets are reversable and will have their names on both sides. The U8s and U10s are almost complete and information for the older age groups will be sent out in the coming weeks.

From the courts,

Mark Smith

President Runcorn Rockets Basketball