Hi everyone,

What may be included in fees

I was informed recently that people believe the Rockets fees have gone up astronomically. Just to help clarify when you register on Basketball connect if your basketball Queensland fees are due during that season you will be charged $70 to Basketball Queensland and Southwest Metro fees are $30 per season which is an extra $100 that is not on our registration.

Rockets fees have gone up this season. They’ve gone up between $10 and $15 depending on age group in 2023 which works out to be between 50 cents and 75 cents a week increase.

Why our fees went up -

# every team is now charged a registration fee from South West Metro of between $20 and $50. At $50 that is an extra $3,400 per season.

# game fees have gone up an extra $5.00 per game, we have 68 game weeks multiplied by 18 weeks is $3,100 per season.

# court hire has gone up around $15 per hour. We have 34 hours of training sessions per week by 20 weeks which is equivalent to $10,200 per season.

These are just a few of the increases in cost that we will incur in the coming season which is why the $10 /$15 increase per season.

Training fees last year

Last year we were charged an average of $40 per hour for training and Stretton Community College charged us $90 an hour. That extra cost was $900 extra to Rockets for every one hour of training we had a Stretton for each season.

When these things occur we have two choices

1) we could tell all those teams that train at Stretton we are losing money and they can’t play for us

or

2) we apply for more grants and look for more sponsors to help us support those teams.

We always do the latter and we have found sponsors and received some grants to pay for the difference.

Returning Singlets

Our next issue is that singlets from last season are not returned. Some coaches allow the players to take their singlets home and every season we lose Singlets which cost us money. It’s not just one or two singlets. The fact is we cannot buy one or two singlets we have to buy them in lots of 10. So it does not cost us $40 or $50 it costs $400 or $500 when we lose one or two Singlets.

Please don’t ever think Rockets are trying to make money out of you or we charge exorbitant fees.

We do everything in our power to ensure we look after every single member of Rockets and they enjoy their time with us. Everything we do goes back to your children as we are all volunteers.

Have a wonderful break and I will see you all on the 21^st January if not at the shopping centres

Kind Regards

Mark