Irish basketball will tap government and USA to double size of arena

The new five-year strategic plan announced one of the primary aims is to modernise the facility with the help of domestic and international sources of finance.

At the launch of Basketball Ireland’s Five Year Strategic Plan 2023-2027 at the Oblate Hall, Dublin yesterday were Basketball Ireland CEO John Feehan with Ireland internationals James Gormley and Ciara Bracken, U16 international Kareem Matonmi and David Ajavon from Moyle Park College. Picture: Inpho/Laszlo Geczo

Basketball Ireland will be seeking the financial support of the government as well as US benefactors to help it significantly redevelop the National Basketball Arena and double its capacity by the end of 2026.

The Tallaght venue is now 30 years old and in the governing body’s new five-year strategic plan announced yesterday one of the primary aims is to modernise the facility with the help of domestic and international sources of finance.

“What we’d like to do is essentially double its capacity,” BI chief executive John Feehan elaborated in an interview with the Irish Examiner. “At the moment it’s around the 1800-2000 mark depending on the seating configuration so we’d like to get that up to about 3,500. Not just for major basketball matches but for other sports and events.” 

The desired upgrade would also include a high-performance gym which could also be open to the public, new and larger dressing rooms and toilets, and a larger concourse hospitality area.

“It’d all be on the same site. The building footprint would be maybe slightly bigger but it’d mostly just using better use of [existing] space.” 

Basketball Ireland will be making a case to government for financial support, believing, in the words of Feehan, that “we’re a very good candidate for [state] funding.” But they’re also looking at other sources of revenue to aid the project, including naming rights, greater commercial income and also through a patronage programme by reviving the tradition of Irish basketball connecting with American corporations and benefactors.

“In the past a lot of sports have done almost a raid on the States – give us and your money and that’s it. But I think a proper patronage programme is about communication and building relationships. So we’ll approach people in the States and build a relationship with them over time where we regularly keep them updated, invite them over to see what we’re doing. There is a whole series of different things we can do to run a proper patronage programme where people feel really involved rather than turning up with a cheque every so often.

“I don’t see us putting that in place for another year or two. But we’d hope to have [the Arena redevelopment] completed by 2026. That’s the ambition. Now, it might drift out a bit. When you look to develop or reconstruct any site, it can take a considerably long time to go through the planning process. We can’t pre-empt or guarantee anything but one way or another we will be redeveloping the stadium; to what extent depends on the level of government funding. The next year is or so is about drawing up the plans, the year after that about ensuring we put the funding packages together, and then we’ll build it after that.” 

Another aim is to appoint a technical director for the sport, a position that the governing body hasn’t bothered with since the late noughties but Feehan sees being filled “at the front-end” of the five years the 2023 to 2027 strategic plan covers.

“We need to professionalise our pathways and overall structure to get the best players into position so we can produce good national teams at all levels and that’s not going to happen by itself,” says Feehan. “It needs somebody to look over those structures and coordinate it all.” 

The strategic review is also targeting Olympic participation through 3x3 with the hope being that the three-man game would qualify for funding in line with other Sport Ireland high-performance programmes which would see a handful of players being suitably carded and funded.

“We’ve already been in discussions with Sport Ireland about this and have found them very positive and open to the idea. There’s an appreciation of the sheer scale of basketball, that it’s the second-biggest sport in the world and that almost every country in the world has a serious national basketball team. So we need to ensure that we can compete at international level, and 3x3 is certainly an area where we could qualify for the Olympics, both in the men’s and the women’s.

“Obviously Sport Ireland have to make choices but we think we’ve made a very good case for the 3x3 programme and that they see it as a very good case too.” 

The report covers all strands of the sport in the country, with the aspiration to increase the number of clubs from 210 to 260 nationwide by 2027, and the number of registered players from 31,000 to 42,000.

It has also called for the establishment of a working group to help clubs gain greater access to existing sporting facilities. As well as school gyms that were partly funded by the taxpayer but remain unavailable to clubs outside of school hours, Feehan envisages basketball linking up with the GAA at both grassroots and chief executive level to share facilities.

“It’s well recognised at this stage how basketball is a sport that greatly complements the GAA. As well as there being minimal overlap in our respective seasons, a lot of high-profile football players and coaches have spoken about how much they’ve learned from basketball and how it can transfer to GAA. So there are conversations to be had from the top of our respective organisations down and also for us to have conversations with other sports because a significant number of facilities are not available to them either at the moment.”