The Templar Warriors Newsletter

Issue Number 7

Wednesday, 1st June, 2022

Things certainly have become busy for us at the BMBA, Multiple School Clinics, Open Nights, After School Training and another Holiday Camp are all either being conducted or are in the pipeline.

Check out our updates below

News, announcments and updates

School Clinics are going gangbusters!

Our bookings for school clinics for this term have taken off. We have enjoyed the privilege of conducting clinics at St Joseph’s in Elsternwick,  Malvern Central Primary School, Huntingdale Primary School, and St Kilda Primary School. This week we are currently conducting clinics at Black Rock Primary School and Huntingdale Primary School. Next week will be at McKinnon Primary School, Malvern Central Primary School once more and Huntingdale Primary School again. 

At Huntingdale Primary School the kids are enjoying a four-week stint with us. Through this we can teach them about the game and generate in a much more in-depth way and hopefully generate some real interest amongst their students. Judging the amount of kids shooting  hoops during their recess and lunch breaks it seems to be working well.

We have been warmly welcomed at each school and we have been incredibly impressed at both the enthusiasm and politeness of all the students we have had participate in our clinics.

A special thanks to Louise Howell (St Josephs PS in Elsternwick), Ruth Biddle (Huntingdale PS), Teaghan Watt (Malvern Valley PS), Steve Muller (Black Rock PS), Hayden Colgrave (St Kilda PS) and Dylan Hislop (McKinnon PS) for arranging our BMBA clinics for their schools and students. 

So don’t miss out,  have your school book us in today to provide the same skills, drills and fun for your students. We would love tobring them our knowledge and passion for the game.

 

BMBA School Clinic follow up with our youtube video series

At the BMBA Templar Warriors, we want to provide much more than just a basketball experience when we run school clinics. We want to introduce the kids with some motivation and ideas to improve their game, Whether they have played, are playing or never have played, we want to make sure your students have an avenue to continue their basketball journey once our clinics at your schools are concluded.

We also want to give the wonderful teaching staff, something to follow up with especially when preparing for inter-schools sports such as hoop time. Finally, where there is interest amongst students at the school to form teams through the BMBA, attend our training sessions or one of our camps, we want to provide for any student/child who is keen to do so to continue to develop their game on their own through us.
To do this we are producing basic videos, covering skills and drills that we conduct at our school clinics along with other basic fundamental skills of the game kids will need to develop to play the game properly. In doing this teachers and volunteers with school teams can also access these videos to receive some ideas on skills to develop and drills to enhance those skills.

Feel free to share this video series with your students, staff and volunteers via your social media, school newsletter or any other means. In doing this you can help us ensure we follow up our clinic experience for your students with further development opportunities for those students who wish to explore them. If you haven’t booked us in for a clinic yet, get cracking and do so and then you can share these videos with your students beforehand so they are fully prepared for us when we arrive.

On the left is the first of series of videos we will make available to schools, their teachers and their students. This one covers some basic ball-handling drills and three game dribbles in the crossover, crossover through the legs and the spin.

In this video we break down the dribble to demonstrate the footwork and the best way to teach them to your students.

Click on the video on the left to go to our first video or 

CLICK HERE to go directly to it on our youtube channel.

Make sure that while you are there you also subscribe to our youtube channell for future videos and updates.

BMBA "Two for One" Offer!

The BMBA Templar Warriors are offering a “two for one” deal until the end of term two.

If you register your child/children for two or more sessions of our July holiday camp then they will also receive FREE after-school training at St Michael’s Grammar for the remainder of term two.

This means your son/daughter could receive up to eight extra sessions over the next four weeks at no cost.

Register for the camp today and just attend what sessions suit you the most for the next four weeks. 

CLICK HERE for more details on this offer.

CLICK HERE to go to our camp page to register.

SBA Spring Season registrations open - Join a Templar team now!

The BMBA Templar Warriors will be entering teams into the Southern Basketball Associations Spring Phase season which commences in term 3 this year.

We would look to enter both boys and girls teams where there is enough interest generated across all age groups and competitions.

Competitions ages groups and days are as follows: 

  • U10 Boys & Girls – Thursday Evenings
  • U12 Boys – Saturday Mornings
  • U12 Girls – Monday Evenings
  • U14 Boys – Saturdays
  • U14 Girls – Tuesday Evenings
  • U16 Boys – Saturdays
  • U16 Girls – Wednesday Evenings
  • U18 Boys – Saturdays
  • U18 Girls – Monday Evenings
The cut-off date is the 31st December of the year of the competition. So for the U14 age group, your child would need to be 13 years of age as of the 31st of December. To register your son(s) / daughter(s) CLICK HERE.
 
Become a TEMPLAR WARRIOR in 2022.

June school holiday is set to go!

In the April school holidays, we ran our first-ever holiday camp and it was a HUGE success!

Now we are set to go again in the approaching June Holidays with a great venue, with lots of kids, some great coaching and most importantly plenty of skills, games and fun.

This time we are also offering a “two for one” offer where if you register early you also receive FREE after school training sessions at St Michael’s Grammar in the leadup to the camp. (refer to this offer above)

This camp will go over two weeks:-

Week One: Monday, 27th of June to Friday, 1st of July.

Week Two: Monday, 4th of July to Friday, 8th of July

The camp will be conducted by veteran coach Bob Mann, All-Star Canadian Import Joe Davis and USA import Jon Kirkman. 

Two weeks of great coaching, great skills, great drills and games and of course great fun. For further information and to register your child/children CLICK HERE.

After School training at St Michael's Grammar.

We have plenty of space in our after-school training for players interested in improving their game or joining a BMBA program or team. We also have a great opportunity for participants who book two sessions or more at our June Holiday Camp they can receive these after-school sessions for FREE for the remainder of term two. Refer to our “two for one offer” below. 

Our after-school sessions are held on Wednesdays and Thursdays and involve two sessions, one between 6:00 pm and 7:30 pm and the second between 7:30 pm and 9:00 pm. The earlier session will be targeted for primary school students and the later session at Secondary College students. Both sessions though will be open to all students.

These sessions are conducted at St Michael’s Grammar in St Kilda East.  We are excited that we are in a position to offer these skill development sessions as the main goal of the BMBA is to bring elite level coaching to juniors that wouldn’t otherwise receive it. 

Now that we have the venue and times locked in, we can begin that journey and build something very special in the coming months and years.

For more information on these sessions please CLICK HERE

Play the video on the left for a major BMBA St Michael’s announcement for Term Two about after school training.our

Can you help us spread the word and raise awareness!

We are steadily delivering in person a letter, an A3 poster and ten B5 flyers to over 120 primary and secondary schools. The flyer/poster is shown below. Can you help us raise awareness of our new program and what it offers both your school and your students.

Now that we have high-standard venues to conduct our high-level, independent training and coaching programs, we need participants to register. In a very short time we have put together an amazing basketball product, but to nourish and grow it, we need people to register their kids into the program. In doing so this will enable us to continue to come out to schools such as yours to run our clinics

You can help us to build this program so it remains in place for your students for years to come by spreading the word about our program. You can right-click on the images below to share it on social media, or you can left-click to go to a PDF version that you can print and distribute to friends, families and associates.

(left click for a pdf of the below flyer, right click to save the image)

Knight Sport come on board to support our clinics.

We are pleased to announce that Knight Sport, Moorabbin has come on board to support our efforts in conducting FREE clinics at Primary schools.

Knight Sport will now be our official supplier of basketballs and equipment for our FREE primary school clinics. This is vitally important for us to ensure that we have some quality equipment at every FREE school clinic that we conduct.

To see what Knight Sport can provide and their latest promotions and discounts, please click on their logo above to go to their website.

Players and Coaches News

There is no stopping Joe!

There has simply has been no stopping our All-Star Canadian import, Joe Davis.

Since our last newsletter Joe has put forward the following number:

  • Versus Surf Coast – 16 points and 12 rebounds.
  • Versus Whittlesea – 27 points and 5 rebounds
  • Versus Melton: – 31 points and 7 rebounds
  • Versus Wallan –  36 Points and 7 rebounds
  • Versus Sherbrooke – 19 points and 10 rebounds
  • Versus Gippsland United —  29 points and 11 rebounds
Joe now is second in his BIG V competition for scoring with 25.69 points per game. Simply outstanding. Look to get Joe out to your school by booking a clinic today.

Welcome to the BMBA Jon!

The BMBA recently also added USA college import Nijon (Jon) Rickman to its coaching ranks. Jon is a 23-year-old, 195 cm Forward from Cleveland Ohio. Jon played for two colleges (Universities) in the States at Waynesburg University (2021-2022) and Allegheny College (2017 to 2021).

At Allegheny College, Jon had the honour of captaining his team, which is an indication of how highly regarded he was. Over here Jon has signed with the Melbourne University Black Angels who currently sit undefeated atop the Division One Men’s ladder, so he is set for an exciting few months.

Jon has already featured at a number of our clinics and has been very popular amongst the students. Together with Joe Davis, we have two young men committed to giving your students a quality event that will provide plenty of fun while hopefully teaching them about the game.

Why the Templars?

We chose the Templars as we believe some values are eternal.

We don’t just want our symbol/mascot to project strength and tenacity, we want it to be something that defines our culture and the values we want to embed amongst our participants and players.

While the Templar Knights were fierce Medieval Warriors, they also lived by a code of honour, respect, courage and they dedicated their lives to self-sacrifice in the pursuit of servitude towards others.

We believe that this represents the culture we want to build within our program perfectly.

Christianity through Hoops

As we said earlier in this email we have designed a “Christianity through Hoops” program to complement Catholic schools and Christian schools more generally. Our purpose is not just to develop better basketball players, but also to develop better people. We believe sport can be a great influence on our youth in a good way and what better way to reinforce Christ message not just to our players but their parents and wider networks as well

Younger Kids

We do our best to group participants to match their ages and abilities as much as possible. This ensures the kids obtain as much enjoyment as possible from their time with us. Generally, for younger kids, the emphasis is as much on having some fun while being taught some new skills to use in their domestic games or programs.

In teaching these skills we do so as much as possible through drill formats with the kids in teams and engaging in competitive drills with plenty of encouragement and with more emphasis on attempting to use their newly taught skills as on winning. 

Older Kids

For our older groups, we teach them more through simulated match situations and scrimmage games. Drills are still used but with the mindset of using these drills to develop skills for games situations and then putting them into those game situations.

While still focusing on enjoyment and fun, older participants are normally looking for more challenging training and coaching with a greater emphasis on competition and challenges with the skills being taught. 

Girls

Our training is designed for both boys and girls. Where numbers permit we organise girls into “girl only” groups which make things more enjoyable for the girls. We also design different skills challenges for the girl’s groups.

In the unusual event (especially in the older groups) that a girl or girls would prefer to join in with the boys, we would look at that situation where capabilities permit it.

Boys

Of course, our training is open for boys as well.  As with the girls, we look to form them into boys-only groups. This again is dependent on the number of enrolments we have.

These groups are sorted along both age and capability lines as well as keeping kids in their friendship groups where possible. Most importantly, as best as possible we place participants in groups where they are comfortable with their current skill level and where they can obtain the most enjoyment from their participation in the BMBA program.

For the more motivated

We also have groups for those players who are more motivated and wish to obtain more serious training to improve their game. We can either form them into a separate group or embed them in a group and simply provide them with more challenging drills and skills for them to use and learn from.

They will receive condensed high-level coaching and drills that will challenge them and help them improve their current skills considerably or learn new ones for future games and opportunities.

Our Coaches

Our Coaches are predominately players Bob has brought through with him via his caching career. They all have predominately graduated through Bob’s representative basketball programs. We also recruit coaches from Universities and schools who have either played or coached at a high level. All our coaches are trained in the drills and basketball programs that we implement and are supervised through all our sessions. Naturally, all of them will have to obtain and provide Working with Children Checks to be able to work with us, where they are old enough to have one.

Our Venues

At the moment we operate from outdoor school courts due to Covid-19, but we are now working to secure an indoor court now that schools have reopened from lockdowns. 

We are looking for a venue in the South East Suburbs of Melbourne, preferably within the boundaries of the cities of Glen Eira, Bayside or Kingston.

If your school fits that bill and wants to help us have kids in our community become involved in a positive recreation and program while making some revenue for your school, then contact us to discuss the possibilities.

 

Book a clinic today!

We are now ready and willing to go. So book us in to visit your school to promote our sport, our program and the possibilities we can present for many of your students.

CLICK HERE to contact us today to book us into a visit to your school.

BOB MANN BASKETBALL ACADEMY (BMBA): ABN 33 497 866 231

CONTACT NAME: Bob Mann 

CONTACT EMAIL: bob_mann@bmba.net.au

CONTACT MOBILE: 0490 823 400

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