MORE than two decades of hard work and dedication was rewarded when Dubbo Basketball Association vice-president Peter Hargreaves was awarded a Basketball NSW Long Service Award recently.
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Hargreaves, who admits he knew little about the game when he first got involved in the late 1980s, was shocked to receive the award even though he was informed months prior he was in line for the gong.
“The presentation night was held after the annual meeting and even though I was at the meeting I wasn’t able to go to the awards because I had to be back in Dubbo on the Sunday,” he said.
“I went down with ‘Bomber’ Forrester and when the meeting finished at 3pm we left and came back to Dubbo.”
“A few days later my son John rang me and told me I’d won the award, which was a surprise because even though I got a letter saying I was in line, I never gave it another thought because I wasn’t going to be at the awards.”
It was the involvement of his three children - Wayne, Claire and John - that first got Hargreaves involved in basketball and now he dedicates a lot of his spare time to helping run the Tuesday night local competition and the Dubbo Rams in the State League competition.
But it almost never happened. “Myself, my wife Lesley and the kids came to Dubbo in 1987 and I was primarily a footy coach and footy player,” he said.
“I’d never played basketball and didn’t know much about it. Lesley had played a bit but when the kids got involved I started to go along and watch a bit.
“Claire was the last of the kids to start playing as she had played netball but when she was in the under-14s they had no coach so me and another parent bumbled our way through the season and the next year I got asked if I’d be junior director.
“I told them they wanted someone who knew a bit more about the game than me but they talked me into it and since then I have been involved in some form or another.
“I remember at one stage early in the piece I tried to help out by refereeing and even some of the kids looked at me funny when I would make calls but you learn as you go along and basketball has been a lot of fun.
“Seeing the girls win the State League in 1994 and the boys in 1993 was a real highlight because those titles are really hard to win.”
These days, only Claire is still actively playing the game and balances that with various representative coaching duties while John is also a highly-regarded coach who is the current mentor for the NSW Country under-16s boys team among others.
But Hargreaves has no plans of ending his involvement with the sport.
“I enjoy the sport and more than that the company of the people involved,” he said.
“Watching our kids in their junior days was always good. Wayne went to the army so he never kept going but Claire and John are still heavily involved and it’s great to see them both doing something they enjoy.
“To see them bringing through young kids and trying to help them become better basketballers is great and something that gives me a real thrill.”
