Start a new Midnight Basketball location

Welcome from all of us at Midnight Basketball Australia.

We want to help you provide more positive, fun, healthy and highly social activities for all Australian teenagers on Friday and Saturday nights.

From the moment we proudly started our first tournament in the Sydney community of Redfern over 10 years ago, we knew we had something special and Midnight Basketball is a highly-regarded, community-driven social inclusion program for teenagers from 12 to 18 years old.

We use the sport of basketball to provide a structured and supportive environment where teenagers can develop a range of life skills while socialising, having fun and building their confidence. Our aim is that every teenager who participates in Midnight Basketball will build the skills and confidence to be able to identify and embrace positive opportunities in their lives and community. We do this through an fun community-run Tournament that combines the benefits of team sport and civic participation to learn life skills and make the process of identifying steps to training, employment and social inclusion more enjoyable, believable and concrete.

As a catalyst for community building, it is dependent on volunteers and other stakeholders from across communities including a wide range of cultural, sporting, service and volunteer groups and individuals, local businesses, educators, local councils, youth groups, parents and many more who bring their expertise and mentoring skills to build the foundations for a confident and resilient identity future for the participants.

As it expands across the country, we are constantly rewarded with examples of communities who have embraced Midnight Basketball and are able to see it work and the impact on local teenagers.

Midnight Basketball Australia supports communities in running the program. We understand that setting up and managing your Tournaments takes a lot of work. To help, we have an online tournament system and a lot more to help this process. Following approval, we provide further training, full access to the online portal, including media packs and more to help you build a fantastic, sustainable program and outcomes for your local teenagers.

If you believe Midnight Basketball would help provide a positive, fun and high energy activity in your community, and you can demonstrate local capacity to make it happen, we will provide support to help you set it up in your community.

We look forward to meeting your community and working with you.

Consider the following carefully to assess your viability to get up and running.

Is Midnight Basketball what you are looking for?

Our About Midnight Basketball Australia page provides in depth information that describes our Midnight Basketball Tournament Model. This is a great place to start to see just what Midnight Basketball is all about as this can take some time. Please also call us if you would like to talk through - always welcomed.

Talk through with a range of people in your local community

We are huge proponents of providing more positive, healthy, magnetic, high energy and fun activities for teenagers on weekend nights in Australia for a huge number of reasons. As you will read on the About page, there are a huge range of benefits for teenagers, including hitting the weekend binge drinking culture head on by providing a magnetic, fun alternative.

We provide you with a highly automated solution to run Midnight Basketball, however it will rely on you and your local volunteers to make the magic happen. We want you to be sure it will be useful to you, will enhance your community and aligns with local plans and activities within your community. We encourage you to talk to a wide range of people early on to see how aligned you believe we are, if there is a gap for this kind of activity and if this is something your community actually wants.

As we have always learnt a lot from the feedback from these discussions, we encourage you to provide feed back openly.

Be sure you have these well-tested minimum requirements

Our experience suggests the following is required, as a minimum, to bring Midnight Basketball to your community:

• You have a local established need for Midnight Basketball.
• You have identified why you believe Midnight Basketball is an activity that will enhance your community.
• You have a realistic understanding of the commitment and capacity of your community to deliver the Tournament Model effectively, aligned with its objectives and be excellent.
• You have identified indoor basketball facilities (2 courts min.), including breakout areas/area to eat.
• You believe you have ability to recruit volunteers and support from diverse stakeholder groups (that is, different sectors eg the business community, teenager and support services, sport, volunteer groups like Rotary and Lions, and a range of great motivated individuals. (We have a well-established volunteer marketing plan to implement this.).
• You have an intention to commit to Midnght Basketball, if all goes well, for two years or more - with a minimum of two x 6-8 week Tournaments each year (a total of four Tournaments over two years).
• You can identify (not required yet) an organisation to auspice the program locally and sign an agreement with Midnight Basketball Australia to run Midnight Basketball in your community.

Application

We know from experience what a huge effort the community makes to bring this all together and be sustainable, and we are here to help you however we can.

Midnight Basketball Australia asks you to complete the Enquiry Form to clarify initial requirements to provide more certainty that it will be successful and sustainable. We use this information to assess whether you have the fundamentals required and highlight initial gaps for discussion. We have run over 250 tournaments around the country, mostly amazing but we also learnt a lot when it didn't work and carefully assessing why that was - there are elements that communities and ourselves found not to work as well and what became imperative to success - we will provide the input of this experience also.

If you would like to proceed complete this online form. Once we launch we will contact you about being in our first round of communities to run the new Midnight Basketball.

New community application form

Review by Midnight Basketball Australia

• We will review and call you to discuss.
• Once assessed and we both agree a local Tournament is viable, we will setup and provide access to your localised online Midnight Basketball Tournament System and public website to get started.

How Midnight Basketball Australia will support you

We will bring together the collective experience of over 250 Tournaments around the country over 10 years and help wherever we can where it makes sense to support nationally. From enterprise technology, to fantastic Tournament kits, we want to get every tournament off to a great start by providing communities with a heap of support, including:

• the online Midnight Basketball Tournament System, including the Launch Portal, which provides a detailed outline and support materials to help you plan and run a launch event and your first tournament.
• your personalised local public community website is automatically updated with the details you will enter as you setup the tournament.
• loads of other support:

  Support provided by Midnight Basketball Australia

  Aside from bringing together the collective experience of over 250 Tournaments around the country over 10 years, we help wherever we can.

  Midnight Basketball Australia is committed to continuous improvement of the Tournament Model in response to community needs and the provision of items we can provide through national partners, sponsorship arrangements, pro bono expertise or other innovative means. From amazing enterprise technology, to fantastic Tournament and Marketing kits, we want to get the program off to a great start by providing communities with a heap of support.

  To do this, Midnight Basketball Australia provides communities with the following items, subject to available resources:

  • A professional Midnight Basketball kit: team singlets, bags, display banners, volunteer lanyards, player awards and trophies
  • Skills sessions support and advice.
  • MBAustralia staff visit each community during the initial two year period and ongoing as required, for initial community meetings, Management team and Tournament night volunteer team training and as otherwise required for the purposes of helping, assessing and supporting outcomes and effectiveness.
  • Zoom, telephone and email support before, during and after each Tournament as required.
  • evaluation - loads of ways for you to evaluate the performance and outcomes of your Tournament
  • A dynamic online Midnight Basketball Management System providing an out of the box solution which includes:
    • localised dynamic public website with automated Tournament information
    • online registration for players and volunteers
    • leaderboard results, local contacts and more
    • online Tournament system including automatic rostering, scheduling, registration, collection and management of data and much more
    • manuals / guidelines, auto-checklists and all relevant systems, forms, materials and templates - helping you to run a great tournament
    • automated online reporting including graphical spatial data management
    • dashboards and checklists and other portfolio support for Management team to manage their individual portfolios
    • marketing, media and public relations support, including Media Pack (to support media and photo shoots), an automated marketing portal with checklists, templates, and other support for generating local marketing and media material

Setup and run your first tournament

• Register initial local volunteer management team members online.
• Plan and hold Midnight Basketball Launch event to build profile and gain support.
• Register the rest of the volunteer management team
• Register the tournament night volunteer team online.
• A local organisation will sign agreement with Midnight Basketball Australia.
• Finalise your Midnight Basketball Tournament Builder setup
• Register players
• Run your first Midnight Basketball Tournament using the online Tournament System !