BASKETBALL
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Four-time Olympian Shane Heal believes the Wollongong Hawks would solve a lot of their financial problems by moving home games back to the Snakepit.
An NBL championship winner with Sydney in 2003, Heal played 440 games with five clubs before retiring in 2009.
He captained the Australian Boomers at the 2004 Olympics, while his 21-year pro career included stints in the NBA and Europe.
The man nicknamed Hammer fondly remembers lining up for visiting teams at the Snakepit, which served as the Hawks’ home from 1979 to ‘98 before they moved to 6000-seat WIN Entertainment Centre.
The humble Snakepit holds less than 2000 by comparison, but Heal reckons it always felt like 5000.
If the Hawks manage to survive their latest financial crisis, Heal said there are several reasons why management should seriously consider playing a portion of the club’s 14 regular season home games at the Snakepit.
‘‘If they played a handful of games at the Snakepit, that would bring the overheads right down and make it really affordable,’’ he said.
‘‘Not only that, but the place would be bursting at the seams and it brings that atmosphere back.’’
The Hawks have been in voluntary administration for the past few weeks and have been calling for sponsors and investors to keep the club alive.
If they don’t survive and fellow battlers Townsville also fold, the NBL will be trimmed from eight to a farcical six teams.
Australia’s greatest player, Andrew Gaze, believes the league should pack up for a couple of years and work on a new model.
Heal doesn’t agree.
‘‘I don’t necessarily think the league should shut down, but it needs to understand it has to make serious change and it needs to do it really quickly,’’ he said.
‘‘Rather than taking a year off and affecting the livelihoods of the players and coaches and administrators, that’s a really difficult thing when you put it in a bigger picture. But no question, everyone needs to buy into the fact that the current model is broken. When everybody understands that and says it is broken, we need to be able to then come back and work out how to rebuild it.
‘‘Maybe this is a three-year plan to be able to come back to the smaller stadiums.’’
The NBL had 13 teams when Heal was a rookie with the Brisbane Bullets in 1988 and expanded to 14 the following season.
The blonde bomber would love to see a return of the days when the league had clubs in Geelong, Newcastle, Canberra and Tasmania.
‘‘You could have 16 teams back in,’’ he said.
‘‘I spent three years with Geelong and that program was exploding the whole time. It only holds 2600 but the games were sold out weeks before and the whole town was buzzing about it. When we start getting that in Tasmania and Canberra and Geelong and Newcastle, you can get back to those days again, and you’ll have a vision of what it’s going to look like after three years, and also that next phase of three to six years.
‘‘I was a big advocate when I was in Sydney that we should’ve been playing in Homebush and selling out. We had one game there and sold out and it was an unbelieveable atmosphere.
‘‘I don’t know the fundamentals of Wollongong and what they pay for stadiums and all the rest of it, but as an overall strategy for the league, this is something that can then grow. If it’s a 3000-seat stadium which is going to sell out quickly, people have to buy a ticket and commit to it.
‘‘You might be turning people away in 3000-seat stadiums, but you’ve actually got a sustainable model which can be profitable. If that means bringing down all of the overheads and keeping budgets within reach, that’s obviously a very important thing for where we’re at right now.’’