Sa very disappointing overall.

6-10-12-13 boys u15
5-10-13-14 girls u15
3-8-10 boys u14
2-8-9 girls u14

Slight Improvement from wa.

SA teams were ordinary apart from the 14's Country team who did well. VM had better athletes that weren't selected for whatever reason? Dont get ahead of yourselves it is only a development tournament.

Qld the only vic challengers

I have mentioned on previous posts SA is a soft competition, not enough regular high quality games against competitive teams in a system that breeds mediocrity. What else can you expect....

The best SA teams who have won medals at Classics and 14 Clubs have played in competitions which have only 2 or 3 very good teams.

Having an even competition doesn't actually make your players better. Just means that each team has a bunch of average players.

That another urban myth often found here.

Not talking about an even competition more about a consistent higher level of competition.
The results peak for themselves in Victoria.

718, 715 is right.

Blaming the competition is a copout by coaches that can't develop players.

A good comp would mean players have 20 mins of high-level competition playing time per week. These kids will soon spend 6-7 hours training per week. Figure out where kids will do vast majority of their development. True competition would help but it is a very small part of it. Focus on the development players get in their training envrionment at club and high performance program level and stop blaming the Friday night comp and sure enough some of your guys might actually become good players.

And even better still find/figure out how to develop the intrinsic motivation of your athletes to do extra work in the weights room and on their skill development and suddenly that 6-7 hours of practice time vs 20 mins of game time blows out to 15-20 hours of development time vs 20s mins. But NO you will sit back and keep blaming "the competition" instead of try to figure out how to make your guys good.

You are right, they have shit coaches in SA and every other state other than Vic

Stand up to them how? To what end? It wouldn't be in the best interests of Australian basketball to try and undermine much of anything that happens in Victoria and you'd be unlikely to succeed, anyway. Want to host a major tournament on the June long weekend? Good luck. Hoping to get some teams away from E/D? No one is turning down the world's largest junior tournament to come to your poorly-run startup.

SCC is a weird event, but I wouldn't stress out that the Vics are so dominant there. It's a development tournament for players, coaches and refs and most teams are severely underdone in terms of structure and organisation. There's no scouting, because there's nothing to scout. Your best weapons for beating a more talented group are basically neutralised in that setting, and the Vics are going to be the most talented group more than 9 times out of 10.

The first State that prioritises skill and physical development over money and winning in younger age groups will gain a massive advantage. SA have a good enough competition, if they do other things better, to be better than Vic in the older age groups despite the disadvantage they have in numbers. Basketball Vic's pathway is a joke, its just covered up by some well run club programs and shear numbers.

I agree with the idea that Friday night competition doesn't have as much of an impact as training and individual player development but the higher standard of competition amongst victorian players is a massive factor.

If you take away the Friday night game time they still get to compete against high level players at training and as there's more of them in vic at the moment, players will just get better by playing better players more often as a result. SA have a few really good teams and the players in those teams will be fine as they'll play against other high level players in their own team but theres kids in those 5th and 6th teams who wont be as good as they could be through not being able to compete against higher skilled players.

Infrastructure and training programs play a massive part in this, really hard to find casual court space in places like Queensland but there are hundreds of courts available in vic that allow players to refine their game

You only have to produce 10 talented kids over 2 years to have a chance at winning, yet vic dominate almost every year.

Why wouldn't we try a handicap system where based on previous years winning margin different states get a head start?
Eg
Vic 0
Nsw 10pts
Act 15pts
Qld 22pts
SA 35pts

Why not give every state a gold medal instead of splitting Victoria up. It's the same result. This is sport. You actually have to be good to win. We teach kids as it stands to be mediocre by letting domestic teams in many associations to play finals. When they become adults they wonder why they cannot get jobs. Life is about competing.

Youth development

Vic rule at basketball
Nsw rule at soccer
Qld rule at rugby
Sa at ping pong
Etc

I wouldn't say Vic rule at youth development. I'd say the masses of population mean they win junior tournaments. For all their success at junior national torunaments I'd say traditionally not enough players have gone on with it. Might change now with all the great resources they are throwing at this.

From where I sit it goes in ebs and flows in certain states and seems to coincide with certain people working in the space for periods of time but then they move on or get feddup and it all dies off. We saw it in QLD with Leonard King involved for a period of time but what did he leave in place?

The key is to develop a sustainable model. Pick the brains of those that really know how to get it done, with proven success in the space, implement these ideas, then a real hotbed of talent will be developed in the region that does that. Basketball, in general, is really bad at generating sustainable success in this space.

Vic really needs the other States to lift there games. If you listen to BV podcast with the former high performance coaches they are quite clear that Vic kids play too many games and don't do enough work on individual development. But this will never change unless the other States start beating them more often, because the competitions generate so much money.

The Vic teams really underperformed in the u14 section of SCC, compared to the u15's. The u14 age group is really strong in both boys and girls, but the teams were very poorly selected, underprepared and the coaches seemed to be happy for some of the kids to play hero ball the whole tournament. I would suggest this is a reflection on the performance of the new high performance coaches. I don't like the chances of them making any changes for the better without being forced to by weight of underperformance.

Victoria versus all stars?