state online school newsletter 22nd of June – BMBA – building better players, mentoring better people

The Templar Warriors Newsletter

Issue Number One for 2024

Monday, 26th of February

Welcome to 2024 - 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.

♦ 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

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.

St Josephs in Elsternwick show what is possible!

Last week we visited St Joseph’s Primary School in Elsternwick for the second straight year. In that time we have conducted multiple clinics and had many St Joseph’s students enjoy our training programs and holiday camps. From that, we have formed two teams for domestic competition with an Under 10 Girls and an Under 12 Boys team representing the BMBA Templar Warriors in fantastic fashion at the Southern Basketball Association competitions. In twelve months we have had well over 70 St Joseph’s students take advantage of our programs, our coaching and our teams in some form.

Thanks to St Joseph’s sports teacher Louise Howell we have enjoyed building a great relationship with the school and more importantly their students. St Joseph’s students are now extremely familiar with our program, our coaches and now our players and teams that attend their school.

In building that relationship students, teachers and parents have also become aware of what our program stands for where we provide professional and elite-level training and coaching while implementing a players and program code for individual development off the court.

Our relationship is so entrenched that at our recent clinic at the school we used BMBA-enrolled students to demonstrate the drills and skills they have been taught through our training program. In effect, they became our assistant coaches through our clinics at the school. Staff and students were extremely impressed and our St Joseph’s BMBA kids had plenty of fun being our in front of their classmates showing them what they can do. It was great to witness from our end.

We are now looking forward to similar relationships and partnerships with other schools and St Josephs is providing a fine example of what can be achieved.

We are now up and running at De La Salle College in Malvern

We are pleased to announce that we have commenced conducting our programs at De La Salle College in Malvern. Each Wednesday afternoon/evening we are conducting our great “Basketball Plus” training sessions between 4:00 pm and 5:30 pm and then between 5:30 pm and 7:00 pm.

We are also running camps at the school during the June and September holidays. These three-day camps will be fantastic events for junior boys and girls to learn new skills, increase their knowledge of the game, receive a BMBA Templars camp t-shirt, make new friends, have some fun and most importantly get them off their couches and into some positive activity.

For parents, they can have their kids looked after for three days, giving them a few days off. A camp flyer with details is below.

We are excited to have access to such a great venue at such a great school and we are looking forward to a long and fruitful time running our great programs at the school and servicing students from surrounding schools.

Older boys wanted for exciting development!

We are looking for boys born in 2007 and 2008 who want to play at a higher level alongside players with a similar mindset to improve.

This is a great opportunity for players who have thought about testing themselves at a higher level or may have tried in the past but encountered barriers when doing so. The BMBA have a core group of boys moving into the U18 age group who are intent on moving into representative basketball from September.

We have already started their training in preparation for this exciting opportunity, but we need at least three more boys to round off their squad.

The squad is coached by a veteran coach with extensive experience in developing squads at this level to be more than competitive. So if you know any boy who would be interested have them contact me via my details at the foot of this page.

While this team is well advanced, we are very keen to be providing opportunities for boys in other age groups and we are also extremely keen to hear from girls in all of these age groups as well.

Holiday Camps for your students!

The BMBA is excited to be conducting holiday camps in the upcoming June Holidays and later in the year in the September holidays.

June Holidays:

In the second week of the June holidays, we are conducting a camp on the 4th, 5th and 6th of July at De La Salle College in Malvern.

Sept Holidays:

In the first week of the September holidays, we are conducting a camp on the 19th, 20th and 21st of September at De La Salle College in Malvern.

In the second week of the September holidays, we are conducting a camp on the 26th, 27th and 28th of September at Wellington Secondary College in Mulgrave.

For more information on our June camp CLICK HERE

For more information on our September camps CLICK HERE

Can you help us promote our programs and camps to your students? If so we will visit your school and conduct FREE basketball clinics for your students

Term 3 Training Programs!

The BMBA is set to conduct more training programs at more venues than ever before. With sessions on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays at De La Salle College, McKinnon Primary School and Wellington Secondary College, our BMBA programs are within reach of most students.

Who are our training programs available for?

Everybody! We have programs for all ages and all students whether they play in a BMBA team or any other team. We just want to help make players better!

Where can you get more information?

Click on the flyers shown here. The flyer on the right provides general information and registration details for our training programs. The flyers below take you to pages with more specific information about these programs.

Can you help us promote our programs and camps to your students? If so we will visit your school and conduct FREE basketball clinics for your students.

Click here to download a PDF version of this flyer

News, announcments and updates

How to get your students a FREE School Clinics

If you would like us o come o your school to conduct a FREE basketball clinic for your school, the process is very simple. Just distribute flyers like the above to your students and we will come out at days and times of your choosing. You provide us with the number of classes and how many students are in each class and we will print and sort flyers so your classroom teachers only have to hand them out to their students.

This term we have already arranged this through St Josephs in Elsternwick, St Joseph’s in Malvern, Our Lady of Assumption PS in Cheltenham, Black Rock PS, Huntingdale PS, St Kilda PS, McKinnon PS and Pinewood PS with more to come. We would love to add your school to this list.

BMBA Teams complete their first season.

Under 18 Boys win BMBA’s FIRST Premiership

Our U18 Boys created some BMBA history last Sunday winning our first ever Grand Final with a comfortable margin of 41-22. Even better the boys went through the season undefeated. We are especially proud of these boys as they only started playing twelve months ago after we visited their school for one of our FREE clinics.

Now they are undefeated champions in just their second season

Under 10 Girls – Semi-Finalists in their first season

Our U10 girls had a fantastic first season. Another team formed from our FREE clinics at St Joseph’s in Elsternwick, the girls improved throughout the season to finish second on the ladder. They narrowly missed out on a Grand Final spot by just two points.

Under 12(1) Boys – Establish an important foundation

These boys didn’t make finals, but they played in the highest grade of all our teams. More importantly, they acquitted themselves extremely well in every game in their first season. Despite only winning one game they could have won several more and go into their next season confident of doing so.

These boys are yet another team formed from our FREE clinics at St Joseph’s in Elsternwick.

Under 12(2) Boys – Improving with every week

This team was a group of boys who had never played in basketball competitions previously and at the start of the season our inexperience really showed. With a bunch of resilience and a desire to improve every week, the boys had improved dramatically by the end of the season.

In their last game the boys held the top team to their lowest score and lowest winning margin and had we shot a little better would have pulled off a massive upset. They are set for a lot of those next season.

What we are offering your students and school in 2023!

In 2023 we are offering your school and students the following.

♦ FREE clinics at your school for all of your students.

♦ Holiday Camps in the June and September Holidays

♦ Terrific elite-level training camps for students to learn the game and dramatically improve their skills

♦ Great introductory programs for 5 to 10- year-olds who want to explore the game in a fun environment

♦ Opportunities to join one of our wonderful BMBA Templay Warrior teams.

♦ All of the above programs are conducted by experienced coaches with elite-level knowledge of 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.

Community through Hoops

At BMBA basketball we are not just about building better players, we also want to mentor better people. We will be implementing this through our “Commnity through Hoops” program.

The primary purpose of this program is covered in our program’s emblem, “The Templars” which is explained below. The way we implement and conduct our programs wants to reflect age-old values for our participants that we believe are just as important in these modern times and moving into the future. In a subtle way through our love of basketball, we want to help embed within our players a sense of honesty, respect, honour and dignity in the way they conduct themselves.

We believe sport is an ideal vehicle for this.

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 convictions 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 four indoor school venues. These are at

Wellington Secondary College in Mulgrave

McKinnon Primary School in Ormond and

Westall Primary School in Westall

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