Article appears in edition three of Handle magazine, available now from your local newsagent. For subscriptions click here.

By Matt Skinner

Twenty-one years ago the NBL had six Victorian teams, and for many years there were four or five Victorian teams, all with their suburban affiliations – St.Kilda, Nunawading, Coburg, Frankston, Melbourne and Geelong. Yet for the past two seasons the Melbourne Tigers have been alone in a city of over 3.5 million people where basketball is on a par with AFL and cricket in terms of its’ junior popularity.

A new man on the scene is part-owner of the recently-announced Victorian franchise – Mark Cowan. As part-owner of the South Dragons with Melbourne businessman Raphael Geminder (Chairman of Visy Industrial Packaging), Cowan is passionate about a revival in basketball’s fortunes in its’ Australian heartland. Cowan says “I’m passionate about basketball. I believe that the time is right and the opportunity is here to do things really well and build a successful new basketball brand in the Melbourne marketplace.”

Cowan’s business background is as a professional who “helps companies build brands” and he has a clear agenda for the vision of their new club:

“Our agenda can be summed up with:
1. Building a deep connection with the basketball community. We’re committed to the development of grass roots basketball in partnership with Basketball Victoria.
2. We’re looking to build a professional organisation that has a clear vision for how it’s going to achieve success.”

The Victorian franchise has taken the big step of making Vodafone Arena their home court for the 2006/07 season. The cost of renting the 10,500 capacity Arena is such that it almost sent its last tenants – the Victoria Titans and Melbourne Tigers – to the wall financially in the seasons of 2000 and 2001. So it’s fairly clear the Cowan has a vision of what his franchise will need to achieve both on and off the court in the next 18 months – “On court our aim is to make the finals and then take it from there. Off court our vision for how the NBL will continue to grow and develop will be through getting crowds to games, because when you have crowds, you have atmosphere, and when you have atmosphere the corporates are happy and the fans enjoy it and keep coming back. My vision includes on-court success because it will get people along to the games.”

It is no surprise that Cowan sees his partner as one of the most powerful people within the game in the future, namely Raphael Geminder – “We have started to see some of his (Raphael’s) influence with some of the corporate interest we’ve already attracted. The number of blue-chip companies in our corporate area will give a slightly different positioning and flavour to our franchise.”

Like myself, Raphael likes to be involved with success. He’s very used to success and he has the financial means and business acumen to make a very valuable contribution to the club and the NBL.”

My ambition is this – in the past I’ve built brands for other people, this time I get to build the brand for myself.”

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