What Are Domestic Competitions
Below is some information to help people new, or interested in participating in the Melton Basketball Association's Domestic Competitions.
What is a domestic Competition?
Domestic Competitions are simply a competition where games are organised by a local Basketball Association with played in the local area. Typically there are Junior and Senior competitions that are organised and run by the Association.
Junior Domestic Competition
In Melton Basketball Association (MBA) Junior Domestic Competition has teams for children ranging from Under 8 Mixed (boys and girls playing together) through Under 10, 12, 14, 16 to Under 18 single gender (boys and girls playing separately).
The teams are arranged and managed by the nine Domestic Clubs. These clubs enter their teams into our competitions every season and play each other through a grading phase, then on to the regular season, followed by finals, where one team wins the Championship for that season in each grade.
To help with the development of the players, each team usually trains once per week (again in the local area), with the Coach teaching the the players skills and drills to help them develop.
Senior Domestic Competition
The Senior Domestic Competition is just like the Junior competition, other than the teams are not organised by club, but by teams of adults that register their teams directly with Melton Basketball. While the Junior competition caters for children, then senior competition is for older teenagers (over 16) and adults that want to play. Another difference between Junior and Senior Competition is that usually Senior teams don't have a weekly training session like the Juniors do, they only have games on game day.
The Domestic Basketball Season
Normally there are two seasons per year in basketball, a Summer Season, and a Winter Season. This is the same for both Junior and Senior competitions.
Summer Season runs from the start of School term 4 (late September to early October), to the end of Term 1 (usually late March or April), The season pauses over the school holidays.
Winter Season runs from the start of Term 2 to the end of Term 3, again, with a break over the holidays between term 2 and 3.
Sometime the Senior competition will resume earlier than Junior competition, but the game date, times and locations are always available to see on the season Fixture (available on PlayHQ: Click here to see our current fixtures.
Structure of the competition
The grading phase occurs at the start of the season, and is a series of games played generally over 4 weeks, where teams of the same age group play each other. The aim here is use the results of each game to group teams of similar skill level that will then form a "grade". Teams from that grade will then play each other through the regular season and on to the finals.
The regular season takes up the most time through the season, and usually runs for around 10 weeks. During this time, game results are collected and count towards the teams position on the ladder, the ranking of each team in each grade. The more successful the team, the higher their ladder position. The teams that make it into the finals are the ones that finish the regular season at the top of the ladder, for example the top 4 positions might play each other in the finals. The other teams that don't make the finals finish the season at this point.
The finals series happens at the end of the season with the top teams of the ladder playing through a series of games until the final winner is awarded after winning the Grand Final. The structure and number of games of the finals series can change depending on the number of teams in the grade