Basketball Australia is the governing and controlling body of basketball in Australia, responsible for the development and promotion of the sport at all levels.
Formed in 1939 (as the Australian Basketball Federation) the organisation was constituted in 1946. Basketball Australia became a member of FIBA in 1949 and was incorporated in 1982.
Basketball Australia sanctions Australia's two professional leagues, the National Basketball League (NBL) and the Women's National Basketball League (WNBL) as well as the semi-professional Australian Basketball Association (ABA) which features over 120 member teams from major cities and key regional centres.
Basketball Australia also fields representative teams in FIBA and Olympic competition.
Australian basketball has extensive national and state-based programs to ensure that pathways are provided for all participants in the sport, which includes the National Intensive Training Centre Program and the Australian Institute of Sport.
Basketball Australia provides juniors with the opportunity to compete in national representative competitions from the U16 age group, with the National Junior Championships providing a high level of competition between state teams. U14 Club Championships and the National Schools Basketball Tournament provide elite level competition for younger players.
Basketball Australia's Aussie Hoops program is the sports grass roots program for primary school children launched in 2002.
Basketball Australia is not-for-profit and is funded through membership, sponsorship, fund raising and government grants.
Read more about Basketball Australia: International Representative Teams
Famous quotes containing the words basketball and/or australia:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)
“It is very considerably smaller than Australia and British Somaliland put together. As things stand at present there is nothing much the Texans can do about this, and ... they are inclined to shy away from the subject in ordinary conversation, muttering defensively about the size of oranges.”
—Alex Atkinson, British humor writer. repr. In Present Laughter, ed. Alan Coren (1982)