Last month, Basketball New Zealand (BBNZ) held a two-day residential in Christchurch, with 30 Development Officers in attendance from Associations across Aotearoa.
With the theme of ‘Building the Bench’, the purpose of this residential was to foster further growth, connection, and alignment of the basketball workforce within the BBNZ network. BBNZ has highlighted the strengthening of local development systems – including players, coaches, bench officials, referees, and parents – as a key focus in its ongoing support of basketball at all levels throughout New Zealand.
BBNZ People Development Lead, Amy McClintock says this is the first time the organisation has had development officers from across Aotearoa come together in one setting.
“We want to grow a collaborative group of leaders who can influence positive change in basketball; to have such different expertise and knowledge in the one room to drive the conversations has been really exciting,” says McClintock.
“The theme of the residential was ‘building the bench’ and we unpacked topics such as levels of influence, locally-led development, unique challenges and the importance of wellbeing.”
One of the attendees at the Residential was Greg Brockbank from Basketball Otago.
“It was a full-on weekend and the presenters and content were really good; it was all tailored to what we needed and a good first step in the right direction,” says Brockbank.
“The most valuable thing [in these activities] is always the people in the room, we had some really good, deep and rich conversations – sharing some of the problems we all face and then sharing solutions we’ve found. It was a valuable opportunity to work together with people we don’t usually get to interact with, so that was easily the most valuable part of the weekend for me.”
Brockbank says that coming into this Residential, one of the things he wanted to discuss was solutions to finding referees in the community.
“Recruitment and retention of referees is probably the second-biggest issue that our sport faces [after space], it was broached really well at the Residential and we made some good progress around this. It’s a complex problem, but we definitely got some good stuff out of it.”
McClintock says that while the insights exchanged were invaluable, so too were the connections made.
“People have been really missing the connection with each other, so there was a real buzz about being in one room together; there’s been an incredible amount of new connections made.
“The next step for us now will be maintaining that enthusiasm and continuing to leverage off one another’s great ideas – and the great work that’s being done in our sport.”
