Month completed: October 2007

Sometimes things just fall into place. And that is what happened with goal 140.

I have always loved basketball, more so from a playing perspective than a watching perspective. I played for 15 seasons, and even worked as a basketball referee for four years. But in all that time, I went to just one National Basketball League (NBL) match, and never really followed a particular team.

In the last few years the NBL has suffered from a slow decline in attendances and interest, capped off by losing free-to-air coverage. Case in point for the state of basketball is the history of the Victorian NBL clubs in recent years. In the last few years, three Victorian teams (the South East Melbourne Magic, then the Victoria Titans, then the Victoria Giants) have tried and failed to attract a crowd or make money, and all suffered the same sad fate of extinction.

I have been saddened by this, because I have always thought that basketball should be much more popular. It is widely played throughout primary schools, but this just doesn’t translate to strong NBL attendance figures. I could hypothesise all day as to why this is the case, but I would just give myself a headache.

Anyway, the whole point of that rambling was to introduce the fact that two seasons ago, the latest Victorian team joined the league. This team is the South Dragons.

Rather than lament about yet another Victorian team failing, but doing nothing myself to help, I decided that I should start actually going to matches. Thus goal 140 was created.

This is where a nice twist of fate has come in.

The company I work for has just become very closely associated with the NBL. If you do your research, you will work out which company that is.

This means that now I get free access to any NBL game, anywhere in Australia. At each match we have a corporate box, which is where I sat to watch tonight’s Dragons match, where they unfortunately went down to the Perth Wildcats 97-81. As disappointing as that was, just seeing the game meant goal 140 was achieved.

Having free access to a corporate box made the achieving of this goal very, very easy, and very, very enjoyable. I even got to meet the players post-match.

For those who may be thinking that by getting free tickets I am not really supporting the Dragons as much as I could be if I paid for my seat, I hope that my writing of this post will help the Dragons by inspiring at least one person to go and check out the next Dragons match. Trust me, it will be worth the visit.

Did I mention there was a dozen very fit cheerleaders?