NBL to return to the Coast
of top kids coming through this region, so being able to get here and play in front of them, we know that does huge things to the growth of basketball.”
Gold Coast Rollers backer Billy Cross, whose Cross Promotions is helping raise the profile of the Queensland Basketball League club, has thrown his support behind the move, saying the Bullets games were a great idea for a region that deserved to have its own team again.
“Basketball is on the rise and the NBL is doing a fantastic job, the NBL series was great last year, especially with the return of the Bullets,” Cross said.
“It’s time for us to get an NBL team again, we should move forward for that.”
Bullets players Dan Kickert and Tom Jervis, who helped conduct a clinic at Keebra Park High School yesterday, are also supportive of the move to bring games to the Coast.
The pair will tour China with an All-Australian NBL outfit next month before being part of the Bullets team to play the Chinese team at Carrara.
“It’s always a good opportunity being able to go out and play against a national team like that and I think being able to get that exposure back here is great for basketball in the community and especially on the Gold Coast,” Kickert said.
Jervis said the Bullets had not been able to get to the Coast as much as they would have liked last season.
“But to open this back up and to get back down here and show what basketball’s still about and see the fans is fantastic,” he said. YOUNG South Australian Nathan Pederson has thrown his hat into the ring for next year’s Commonwealth Games by winning the prestige Australian Open singles title.
Pederson, only 22, produced a superb all-round display of bowls when he beat Gold Coast hope Nathan Rice (Helensvale) 21-15 for his fourth Open title covering singles, pairs and fours.
Following on the heels of NSW 20-year-old Ellen Ryan, who clinched her second Open singles title in three years the day before, Pederson and the Gold Coast have struck up a love affair.
“I’d won $10,000 in the last three years up here,” Pederson said after a $13,000 windfall at the Broadbeach Bowls Club yesterday.
“In 2015 I won the fours, was a semi-finalist in the singles and a quarter-finalist in the pairs. Last year I won the fours and now this year I’ve also won the pairs.”
Pederson, who plays at the Modbury club north of Adelaide, said he surprised himself with his near flawless performance against Rice. “Absolutely I did,” he said. Asked if it was the best he has bowled in a big match, Pederson said: “I played well and I was just lucky to get to 21 first.”
Rice, 38, acknowledged that Pederson was able to produce the big plays when he most needed to.
“As a young bloke he could have panicked but he didn’t,” Rice said of his opponent, 16 years his junior.
“I hung in there and gave myself a chance.”
Rice’s runner-up finish will not do any harm to his chances of a place in Australia’s team for the 2018 Commonwealth Games to be played at Broadbeach.
Neither will Pederson’s performance go unnoticed, especially since he is a member of Australia’s development squad and proven he can handle himself on the Games greens.