There's a running joke in Illawarra sport.
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It's the one where players and coaches take a look out the window on a Thursday afternoon, see a few clouds roll in and have a laugh about Wollongong City Council immediately on high alert to close all grounds for the weekend.
One coach sums it up as well as anyone.
"Mate, this is my first year in town," he says with a shrug of the shoulders.
"Where I come from, it takes a lot more than a day of rain to call a game off."
Ground closures and rescheduling games is the norm, rather than the exception, in the Illawarra when there's inclement weather around.
Sure, council has a responsibility to keep the public facilities up to scratch and the region's weather patterns - especially in these crazy climate-change, El Nino times we live in - are more unpredictable than much of the rest of this wide, brown land.
But the primary, if not sole, users of these grounds are the clubs themselves, forced off to avoid turning grounds into mud pits and left to reorganise their seasons around rescheduled games.
It happens in all leagues, Illawarra Coal League, AFL South Coast, Group Seven and Illawarra Premier League. It's the accepted culture.
Unless of course you play on a privately-owned ground where games go ahead more often than not.
Even if some club officials support the council stance, there was a shockingly farcical sense of double standards at seeing Monday's Mercury front page.
Some 6000 people were on hand last weekend to turn Wollongong's Stuart Park - the premier recreational space on the South Coast - into a muddy bog for the benefit of the profit-driven, nauseatingly American-named Color Run.
This isn't even a charity event, though punters can raise money for a nominated cause if they wish.
It's a chance to get some exercise and finish wearing a rainbow of colours, leaving Stuart Park a decidedly muddy shade of brown in the process.
Nearby residents labelled the state of the parkland as a "disaster".
It may be a one-off event, but thousands of sportspeople are denied the chance to wear their colours at a standard weekend game to make it easier for councils to maintain grounds.
Most of these sportspeople are amateur battlers, giving up their free time to train a couple of times a week and play on a weekend.
They map out their lives around the season schedule and when spare weekends are available, only to regularly adjust them at the whim of council decision-makers.
When it comes to priorities, sport in the region has become the losers even before a whistle is blown.
EITHER Andrew Bogut or America's new public enemy No 1 Matthew Dellavedova will become an NBA championship winner next month.
It follows the stunning success of Aussie duo Patrick Mills and Aron Baynes winning the title with San Antonio last season.
Given the NBL struggles for attention in a saturated Australian sporting market and two of its clubs are fighting their way out of voluntary administration, surely something can be done for these NBA heroes to promote the game domestically.
The NBL and Basketball Australia have one of the greatest free kicks in international sport on offer.
So what was the highest-profile promotion Mills and Baynes received when they returned to Australia with the trophy?
It was when they crashed Fox Sports AFL man Julian de Stoop's live cross and he failed to realise who they were, later conceding he thought they were a couple of "Collingwood nuffies".
Assuming Bogut, or Dellavedova - who may not have the highest profile but does play alongside a bloke called LeBron James - also parade the trophy, someone in Australian basketball needs to seize the initiative.
A marketing campaign showing what Australian basketballers are capable of could be the cornerstone to securing a viable, even thriving future for the NBL.
The Wollongong Hawks are expected to return to the competition next season when the club creditors' meeting on Tuesday is expected to approve a plan for the future.
But the Hawks simply cannot continue to go cap-in-hand to the community and expect to survive.
Using the profile of Mills and Bogut for the benefit of the domestic cause is so shockingly logical it might actually work.