Isaac
Years ago
Basketball Ideas Summit
If BA, owners, whatever it is about the current setup, simply cannot come up with the right ideas and establish what clubs need to do to take a large step forward, or cannot afford professional consultants, then could we do worse than have a basketball ideas summit across Australia?
Think of it along the lines of the 2020 summit from a while back.
Invite basketball people to submit their case to be involved. They might be current players, ex-players, owners, sponsors, administrators, uninvolved marketers who like sport, vocal fans, media or heavily involved in junior basketball in development.
Either pick from submissions or invite people directly, but pick 100 names, and maybe a few reserves.
Put them into groups of 10 and give them tools to communicate online - mailing list per group, show them tools like Writeboard (collaborative document writing), Basecamp (project management), etc.
Give each group the same 5-10 categories to cover - things like local club marketing, broader league marketing, players, parity, branding, grassroots, financial viability of clubs, future planning, game nights, etc.
Define any fixed points of information: data about the timing of the NBA, European leagues, ABL, SEABL, NZ NBL, AFL, A-League, Cricket, etc; rough information about typical salaries and club budgets historically; perhaps that BA lacks government funding and needs some way of getting $x00k/yr to support international programs, etc.
Name a deadline for a progress report, and then a deadline for a final submission.
And then leave the groups to do introductions and then get down to business brainstorming ideas, picking the best, and developing them.
It could be that the progress report date is for an organiser to check that groups were on track. Or it could be that each group presents to the others and then groups can absorb that outside information, take the cream, and withdraw to keep nailing down the best of what they have.
Eventual goal would be to find the ideas that are yet to be found or improve what's already out there and nail down things in key categories: guidelines/best practice for linking to grassroots basketball including ways of getting young players and parents to games, number of school visits per week, ways of presenting at school visits, etc; consistent, efficient game night planning; shared marketing tactics at a club level including ways to define and measure those tactics; a decision on salary and points caps and ways of enforcing the former - you get the picture.
Surely suitable parties would be eager to volunteer their time, meaning that such an exercise could be worth trying - never know what it might uncover.
If BA are broke or disorganised, crowdsource what's needed.
Would it be worth trying?
