The Illawarra Hawks are still pressing to bring an NBL match to Canberra this season to ensure the next Patty Mills has a clear pathway to the elite level.
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The Hawks took their first steps into Canberra when they hosted the Adelaide 36ers in an NBL pre-season game at a packed Tuggeranong Basketball Stadium on Friday night.
All 1090 tickets were sold four days before the game and a packed house could be enough to get the capital a callback for a regular season showdown as early as this year.
Hawks general manager Mat Campbell is keen to establish a foothold in the ACT to plug the gap left by the Canberra Cannons and give the region's juniors a chance to flourish on the professional stage.
"The vision for me now is even in this season. We’ve still got the ability to bring an actual regular season game down here," Campbell said.
"That’s not over the line yet and obviously there’s some things that have to be in place from the government’s point of view for us to be able to bring that down here given we’ve got our built-in clientele in Wollongong who expect 14 home games.
"To take one of those games away, there is obviously costs involved from our end, and I have to make sure the members are are on side with the vision from the club’s point of view to try and grow the club and expand out of our own region, and expand the footprint of the Hawks.
"We’re still open to that this year, we’d love to be able to see it, because I think it’s a good opportunity off the back of this pre-season game to really flow and continue that into the regular season, and then into the next off-season."
The Hawks have all their home games pencilled in at the Wollongong Entertainment Centre, and four of those games come in a 19-day stretch from December 23 to January 10. Discussions have taken place about moving one of those games to Canberra in a bid to draw a bigger crowd.
Campbell says it is a tough sell for fans to come to so many games in a tight stretch due to the financial impact, which makes the prospect of shifting a match to Canberra more reasonable.
The Hawks great says a push into Canberra is not a step towards relocation but a way to shore up the foundation club's future and bolster the ACT's high performance pathway.
A crucial part of that plan is memberships, with the club set to launch a two-game membership package for $70 that Campbell hopes will be a perfect fit for Canberra fans.
"From our point of view, we want to expand our club. We’ve been just in our region, but we want to look to other regions around that are close enough to drive, to be able to attract people to come to the game and become a member," Campbell said.
"Our push into the region is to offer membership, offer that experience from a professional basketball level for people from the ACT, and for them to be able to support a team.
"The second push for that is offering up an opportunity for the ACT to have pathways for their juniors into an elite men’s section in basketball.
"With such a good participation and such good junior levels, sooner or later there is going to be another Patty Mills coming out of the group. We want to make sure we’re an opportunity for that person to come through.
"The ACT has been starved of the elite level in men’s basketball for so long, we want to make sure they see it, and those kids playing strive to be a professional basketballer, and put the effort in to get you to that level.
"Hopefully the talent continues to rise out of the ACT and we get another NBA player."
