The Templar Warriors Newsletter
Issue Number One for 2024
Thursday, 14th March
2024 has been busy - We have lots to offer your students and school!
The school year is back on and if you have been like us at the BMBA, no doubt things will have been extremely busy for you to get the new school year under way.
At the BMBA things have certainly commenced with a rush in 2024.
♦ We have been inundated with requests from schools for our offer of FREE clinics.
♦ At those clinics we offer FREE after-school coaching sessions each week
♦ From those clinics that we have already conducted, we have received 45 new
registrations for our FREE coaching sessions
♦ We had two teams who play in the worlds largest junior tournament with both making
their competitions Grand Finals
♦ We have started our new domestic through the Southern Basketball Association
♦ We are working diligently to have own junior domestic competitions for boys and girls
commence in Term Two to be conducted at Westall Primary School.
We are set for an amazing 2024 and we would love to have your school involved in our basketball adventures and journey.
Our Term One calendar is FULL.
The BMBA calendar has exploded with school clinics. For term one we already have seven schools locked in for FREE in-school clinics where we visit schools and run basketball sessions for students during their classes,
So far we have run or are booked in to run clinics at the following Schools during term one.
Pinewood Primary School
Amsleigh Park Primary School
St Peters Primary School, Bentleigh East
St Marks Primary School, Dingley
Oakleigh Primary School
Resurrection Primary School, Keysborough
Westall Primary School
Check out our reports below for the schools that we have visited.
News, announcments and updates
FREE School Clinic #1 at Pinewood Primary School!
Pinewood Primary School is a large school with over 900 students. So to conduct our FREE clinic program with just one coach and over 50 students per session was always going to be a challenge. Fortunately our director, Bob Mann, has over 34 years experience and put together a ball-handling challenge for students that not only had “all” the students engaged and participating, but also presented them with challenges and things to learn about developing their game.
This is the second time we have visited Pinewood Primary School in the past two years, with both being tremendously successful for the BMBA, the school and most importantly the students.
FREE School Clinic #2 at Amsleigh Park Primary School!
In our second clinic we visited Amsleigh Park Primary School in Oakleigh East for the first time. We discovered a school with friendly and supportive staff, some fantastic covered outdoor facilities and students that were engaged, attentive and polite. The skills were also at a high level even with students who didn’t play basketball before.
Another higklight was surviving the storm that knocked down trees and power lines all over Melbourne. It was a first for us working around felled trees and branches and the staff at the school handled it all with aplomb.
We look forward to visiting Amsleigh Park PS on a regular basis into the future
Special thanks to Samantha Hayes for organising our visit
FREE School Clinic #3 at St Peters Primary School - Bentleigh East!
We visited another school for the first time when we ventured out to St Peters Primary School in Bentleigh East.
Again the staff and teachers were supportive friendly and polite. With a strong basketball demographic in the area there was naturally a lot of interest in our clinics and a lot of skill on display. St Peters is a lager catholic school and even though we concentrated on grades prep through grade four, there were a lot of kids to provide a clinic for.
We managed to complete that successfully giving the kids a great time, lots of drills and plenty of ideas on how to develop their game and skills.
We look forward to St Peters becoming a regular fixture on the BMBA clinic calendar.
Special Thanks to Ben Cavarra for arranging these clinics.
FREE School Clinic #4 at St Marks Primary School - Dingley!
Another first time school for the BMBA was St Marks in Dingley.
We were pleasantly surprised by the strong basketball demographic within the St Marks student body, which made the clinics we conducted there all the more engaging and enjoyable.
We were also surprised by the size of the student body as St Marks proved to be a larger school than anticipated. Despite this the clinics went of without a hitch thanks to engagement and enthusiasm of st Mark’s students and support of St Mark’s staff.
We look forward to a return to the courts at St Marks and future clinics at a great school.
Special thanks to Grace Amerena for supporting and organisng this clinic.
FREE School Clinic #5 at Oakleigh Primary School!
Yet another first time school for the BMBA was Oakleigh Primary School.
We were blown away by the facilities located at the school with modern indoor gym and a covered outdoor court. It was certainly nice to be indoors out of the elements.
What’s important however isn’t the facilities, but rather the students and staff. On that score Oakleigh was served very well with engaged and enthusiastic students and friendly and supportive staff.
To make things even better, we debuted our American import for his fist clinics during this week’s clinic and to say it went over well would be an understatement. We can’t wait to return for future clinics with Oakeigh.
Special thanks to Blair Richardson for supporting and organising this clinic.
Why not book in your FREE School Clinic for term two
The BMBA has now conducted 26 FREE school clinics at over 20 schools, with a number now having us back for a second time. That’s free basketball clinics for over 6000 students in just under two years, all for FREE. After the stress and trauma placed upon our kids throughout covid-19 that is something we are particularly proud of. Another thing we are both proud off and grateful for is the extremely positive feedback that we receive from these clinics. It is our goal to not just give the kids a good time but to provide the kids with legitimate coaching, tips and ideas in the sessions that we conduct. From the feedback we are receiving we are achieving that and more.
Why not book us in and check us out for yourself.
Talking of FREE OFFERS - CHECK THIS OUT!
The BMBA is also offering all students from every school the opportunity to enjoy FREE after school training throughout Term One. With just three weeks left make sure your students don’t miss out by sharing the flyer on the right. All parents have to do is scan the QRcode on the flyer, register their son or daughter for their preferred session and turn up to receive some great coaching.
This offer is available to your students even if you aren’t having us out for a clinics. In times where cost of living is biting this is an outstanding offer for parents to at least trial what we have to offer.
From there FREE sessions there will be opportunities for boys and girls to join in further training, join teams and play in competitions.
GIVE YOUR PARENTS A CHANCE TO SCAN THE CODE & GET THEIR KIDS INVOLVED FOR FREE!!!
BMBA school competitions to start at Westall PS in Term Two
To build upon these clinics and to allow us to continue to run them for FREE the BMBA will be launching it first ever domestic competitions for boys on Saturday afternoons and Girls on Sunday afternoons.
The BMBA will be allocating coaches, organising uniforms, competitions training times and referees, all we need is for schools to either send students along to allocated times or even better to form teams and we will do the rest. We will be building these competitions across terms terms two and three and once enough teams have formed will be launching a revolutionary concept to junior basketball.
This new concept will include longer game times, better referees and officiating, unique competitions not seen before and never seen before finals structure that encourages development and participation of players of players as much as it does winning.
For more information and to register and enter teams go to the link below.
https://bmba.net.au/bmba-domestic-competitions/
ENTER YOUR SCHOOL TEAM TODAY!
BMBA teams doing great things in Basketball Tournaments
Our BMBA representative teams have done extremely well in tournaments so far in 2024.
We have entered three teams into two tournaments and all three teams went on to make their sections Grand Finals before sadly losing all three.
Despite these losses we are enormously proud of how our BMBA teams have gone when playing against Association of far great player depth, size and resources.
Our Under 12 Boys made their section Grand Finals in both the Eltham-Dandenong tournament and the South East Junior Basketball tournament. Our Under Boys played in the Eltham-Dandenong tournament and also made their section’s Grand-Final.
Our Under 12 Boys have in particular done very well, making back to back Grand Finals in their two consecutive tournaments. We are looking forward to providing many more opportunities for our BMBA juniors to play in more tournaments and hopefully many more Grand-Finals.
We would love to have as many of your school’s students to be a part of these exciting tournaments and games.
South East Junior Basketball Tournament
U12 Boys Grand Finalists
Eltham-Dandenong Junior Basketball Tournament
U12 Boys Grand Finalists
Eltham-Dandenong Junior Basketball Tournament
U18 Boys Grand Finalists
Can you help us to provide even more FREE clinics in 2024?
To continue to provide these FREE clinics at schools in 2024, we need to ensure that the various basketball programs that we conduct outside of schools hours are well supported. Anything your school can do to help us promote the below programs would be greatly appreciated. For the keener schools we can even bring these programs to your school and run them after school hours on site for your students. All we need is enough interest and enthusiasm from staff and students.
For social media and newsletter purposes, you can can right click on all the flyer images below to save them as a jpeg file, or you can click on the link provided below each flyer image to download a pdf file version.4
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
Our Coat of Arms and what it means
Our stunning Coat of Arms is an integral part of our program. We put a great deal of thought into this as we wanted to establish an ethos and culture to build our program around from our very first day of operation. It represents our past, present and our future. It symbolises the very culture of our program, our values, our ethos and our faith and most importantly now sits in a prominent position on the chest of our playing uniforms.
Embedded within our coats of arms is our BMBA Latin motto of “Fortitudo, Honor, Unitas” which means Strength, Honour and Unity in English. All our teams say this motto in our huddles at the beginning and conclusion of training and matches.
To find out more about our coat of arms, our motto and our culture CLICK HER
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 two indoor school venues. These are at
De La Salle College in Malvern and
Westall Primary School in Westall
We would love to expand our programs to more schools so if your school would like your students to have access to our coaching and training to take advantage of the wonderful programs listed in this newsletter then get in contact with us via our details below.
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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