At its peak in the 1990s, Hoppers Crossing Junior Basketball Club was one of the most successful in the Werribee Basketball Association, with more than 40 teams.
Those numbers dipped over time and were down to an alarmingly low level two years ago.
The proud club was at a crossroads.
Tigers president Mario Costa said that with team numbers almost down to 10, the club’s prospects were looking shaky.
“If we didn’t rebuild … we would’ve gone bust at some point,” he said.
“We were losing girls. They were moving on to other clubs because we only had one or two teams in the different age groups. If you don’t have a certain number of teams, you’re not going to survive in the long term and that’s something I’ve been trying to work on.”
Fast forward to this season and the Tigers are getting back to prominence with 32 teams.
A number of factors are behind the club’s regrowth. The area’s population is growing and interest in basketball is at its highest point in Wyndham, with local son Dante Exum having been drafted into the NBA.
Exum, who got his start at domestic level with St Peters, is a rising star at the Utah Jazz and playing as a combo guard for the Australian Boomers.
The stability provided by a long-time head coach in Stuart McKay and president (Costa) is important, but so, too, is having a loyal band of volunteers.
There is also a somewhat more trivial reason behind the growth and it can be found firstly on Google and secondly on Costa’s voice mail after a long day at work.
“I think it’s because we’ve got the advantage over all the other clubs of having the suburb in our name,” he said. “When people look up the website and see the suburb, we come up first. You can’t complain about that.”
Costa praised McKay for his loyalty. “He’s dedicating his time to coaching not just one team but two – and you don’t get that very often I wouldn’t think,” Costa said.
The loyalty at the Tigers stretches to the playing ranks. In the boys teams, Tristan Kewish (377), Jarryd Langdon (367) and Aden McKay (342) have the 400-game milestones in their sights.
Among the girls, Shannon Jacobs (378), who started two years after the boys, has the chance to break the club’s games record of 460.
The best local players generally filter into the Werribee Devils’ ranks.
The biggest name to come out of the Tigers in recent times is Shannon McCready, who is playing college basketball in the US but returns to play with the Devils in the Big V men’s championship.
“The Werribee Basketball Association relies on domestic clubs to develop the talent at the basic level,” Costa said.
“The Devils take them to that next step, the more elite level and to the higher competitions.
“There’s different stages and we are part of that development of getting kids to a standard where they can play a bit more competitively.”
