I have coached junior basketball in Melbourne for 10 years, including at Big V level, and have coached rep teams from Under 12s through to Under 18s. I write every page of the Victorian basketball guide on this site, and every page carries its sources and the date I checked them.
Founder and Head Coach, Liddicoat Basketball
Ten years coaching junior basketball in Melbourne, and more than 2,000 kids coached, across rep teams from Under 12s through to Under 18s. I have run tryouts, sat through grading nights, made cuts, and had the conversation with a family whose child did not get named in a squad. Most of what is on this site comes from that side of the clipboard rather than from a handbook.
In 2025 and 2026 I coached in Big V Youth League programs, as an assistant coach and as a head coach. Youth League sits at the top of the junior pathway and is primarily an under 23 competition, so it is senior basketball played by players who were juniors a season or two ago.
I also set up and coached Hawthorn Magic's first Eastern Development League teams, and I was head coach of the program for two years. I was the main person building it, and the whole idea was a second chance for kids who didn't make rep but still wanted rep style training. Basketball Hawthorn created the EDL in 2023, and it has since grown into a joint competition with Eltham, Camberwell, Blackburn, Bulleen and Darebin. If your child has just missed out, here is what each association runs.
Alongside that I coach players aged 7 to 17 directly, online, week to week.
The Victorian basketball guide on this site is not scraped, spun or copied from Basketball Victoria, the VJBL or anyone else. Here is the actual process, so you can judge whether to trust it.
Facts are compiled, sentences are written. Facts themselves are not copyrightable. The wording is. So I gather facts from official sources and then write every sentence myself. Where a governing body has published something, I link to it rather than reproducing it.
Every page carries its sources and the date I checked them. Not the date the page was created. The date a human last looked at the source. If a page has not been re-checked in over a year it now says so in a banner at the bottom, and it drops out of the sitemap until someone verifies it again. I would rather tell you a page is old than quietly imply it is current.
Where sources disagree, I say so. Basketball Victoria and Basketball Australia have published conflicting dates for the same event. Associations publish different figures for the same statewide fee. When that happens the honest thing is to show both and date them, not to pick one and sound confident.
Opinion is separated from fact. Anything that is my read rather than a sourced fact is labelled as a coach's note and set apart from the body of the page.
Every tryout date I list is checked, dated and linked. Association tryout dates change, and there is no central feed to sync against. A parent who drives to a stadium on the wrong night because my page was out of date has had their child's season affected by my mistake. So each date says when I checked it and links to the association's own page, and if the two ever disagree, their page wins.
Tell me and I will fix it. This guide covers dozens of associations and competitions across Victoria, and some of it will go out of date or be wrong.
Email admin@liddicoatbasketball.com.au or use the contact form, and say which page it is. If you are from an association or a club and something about your organisation is wrong or out of date, I would genuinely rather hear from you than have it sit there. Corrections get made and the checked date on the page gets updated.
I am not affiliated with Basketball Victoria, the VJBL, or any association. This site is independent, which is the point of it. Where I send you to an official source, that source is the authority, not me.
The reason this guide exists is straightforward. When my own families ask me how rep works, what grading means, or what a season actually costs, I could never point them at one page that answered it. Everything was in a PDF, a Facebook post, or somebody's memory of what happened three seasons ago. So I started writing it down.
I coach players aged 7 to 17 online, week to week, with a plan built around them and at least 3 check-ins a week. Ask me anything before you sign up to anything.
