Melbourne's east is served by Bulleen, Kilsyth, Knox, Nunawading, Ringwood and Warrandyte, plus clubs feeding the EDJBA. Which competition your child plays in depends on the club you join, not the suburb you live in. Rep basketball across all of them runs through the VJBL on Friday nights.
Written by Cameron James, founder and head coach at Liddicoat Basketball. Over a decade coaching junior basketball in Melbourne, including at Big V level, and rep teams from Under 12s through to Under 18s.
Last updated August 2026.
Six eastern organisations have their own page on this site. Kilsyth, Knox, Nunawading, Ringwood and Warrandyte are associations, and Bulleen Templestowe is a club that runs its own junior domestic competition and its own VJBL program. Between them they cover most of the ground from Templestowe and Doncaster in the north east, down through Blackburn, Vermont and Wantirna, and out to Kilsyth at the foot of the Dandenongs.
Knox Basketball plays out of the State Basketball Centre at 291 George Street, Wantirna South, which is also the state's headline basketball venue. Kilsyth runs from the Kilsyth Sports Centre at 115 Liverpool Road, Kilsyth, and lists fourteen junior domestic clubs. Ringwood plays at The Rings on Canterbury Road.
Nunawading is the one that trips people up. The association also operates as Melbourne East Basketball Association, so you will see MEBA on fixtures and Nunawading on the sign out the front. Same organisation. Its home court is the Nunawading Basketball Centre.
Bulleen and Warrandyte work differently again. Bulleen Templestowe runs junior domestic out of Sheahans Road Reserve in Bulleen, while Warrandyte's domestic teams play in the EDJBA and its rep teams carry the Venom name. If you only read the association's front page you can easily miss which competition your child would actually be entered into.
The east does not have a single junior domestic league. It has three arrangements sitting side by side, and which one you get depends on the club you join rather than the suburb you live in.
The EDJBA is the biggest of them. It lists twenty one member clubs and runs from an office in Templestowe. Its footprint reaches from Balwyn and Hawthorn in the inner east out to Warrandyte, and north as far as Mill Park and Doreen. It also runs two rules that surprise families arriving from other competitions, a no zone defence policy and a mercy rule.
The Greater Eastern Basketball Conference is the Saturday home and away competition Ringwood and Nunawading run jointly. It is described as roughly five hundred teams playing about two hundred and fifty games every Saturday across the Nunawading and Ringwood areas, which means you will be at both associations' venues across a season.
Kilsyth and Knox run their own domestic competitions in house. Nunawading also runs midweek junior competitions separate from the Saturday conference, with girls on Mondays and boys on Fridays, in Under 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17 and 19 brackets.
This is the part nobody puts on a website. In the east the individual drives are usually short, but the number of different venues is high.
Nunawading's junior program alone runs across twelve venues. As well as the Nunawading Basketball Centre, its list takes in school and community courts around Ringwood, Wantirna South, Mitcham, Vermont, Glen Waverley and Mulgrave. A domestic season here is not one gym every week, it is a rotation, and the fixture is what tells you where to go.
The EDJBA is geographically wider than its name suggests. A club in Balwyn and a club in Doreen sit in the same competition, so an away game can be a genuine cross town trip even though the league is called eastern districts.
Rep is a different scale again. The VJBL plays on Friday nights across more than eighty venues statewide, so an eastern rep family will end up driving west and north at some point in the season. From 2026 the new Regional League tier is organised into geographic pools specifically to cut that travel, so a team graded into RL should have shorter Friday nights than one graded into a VJL division.
Every association named on this page runs a VJBL program. Knox has the Raiders, Kilsyth the Cobras, Nunawading the Spectres, Ringwood the Junior Hawks, Bulleen the Boomers and Warrandyte the Venom.
Tryouts for the 2026/27 VJBL season are at the start of Term 4, in October 2026. That timing is the same wherever you live, so if you are weighing up two eastern associations you are not forced to commit to one before the other opens.
Basketball Victoria describes the VJBL as more than 1,700 representative teams from over 50 associations, with more than 17,000 participants playing across 80 plus venues on a Friday night. In 2026 the league moved to three tiers. Victorian Championship at the top, Victorian Junior League divisions in the middle, and the new Regional League underneath.
Nothing stops a family trying out at more than one association, and plenty in the east do exactly that, because Knox, Kilsyth, Nunawading and Ringwood all sit within a reasonable drive of each other.
If your address sits between two associations, the honest answer is that both will be fine for a first season. What differs is practical rather than sporting.
Ask three things. Where does the team train on a weeknight, because that is the drive you make most often. Which competition does the club enter, because that decides your Saturday. And how many teams does the club run in your child's age group, because a club with four teams at Under 12 can move a kid into the right division without them having to change clubs.
Fees are worth asking about too, and they are not always presented the way you expect. Nunawading, for instance, lists a winter 2026 team entry of eighty dollars and a weekly team sheet fee of ninety five dollars. Those are charged to the team, not to you. Your club divides them across the squad and adds its own membership fee on top, so the figure on an association's website is never the figure you pay.
The last question is the one parents forget. Ask which venue your child's home games are at, not where the association's office is. In this part of Melbourne those are frequently not the same place.
More than one. The EDJBA lists twenty one clubs across the east, Ringwood and Nunawading run the Saturday GEBC together, at roughly five hundred teams a week, and Kilsyth and Knox run their own domestic competitions. Which one you play in depends on the club you join.
291 George Street, Wantirna South. It is Knox Basketball Association's home venue as well as the state's main basketball facility.
Yes. The association operates under both names, so you will see Nunawading on the building and MEBA on some fixtures and paperwork.
Individual drives are usually short, but venues change week to week. Nunawading's junior program alone uses twelve. Rep is wider, with VJBL games on Friday nights across more than eighty venues statewide.
The start of Term 4, so October 2026 for the 2026/27 season. The timing is the same at every association, so you can attend more than one.
Next questions parents ask
Every competition in this guide
Facts on this page were compiled from the official sources below and written up in our own words. Dates, fees and venues change every season, so confirm anything you are relying on with the association directly.
This page was last updated August 2026. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.
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