Fifteen years ago the NBL found a home in the Far North when the Cairns Taipans played the Melbourne Tigers.
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Fifteen years ago the NBL found a home in the Far North when the Cairns Taipans played the Melbourne Tigers in their first regular season fixture.
The results didn’t come automatically, but it was a victory in itself to get there in the first place.
Rod Popp (former Cairns Marlins and inaugural Cairns Taipans coach): The Boomers were up here playing I think it was in 1996 and that’s when the passionate discussion really started. Like any significant project you’ve always got the folks that say it’s not going to happen. I don’t remember ever thinking it wasn’t though.
Aaron Fearne (first-year Cairns Taipans player, current coach): It was Rod and Denis’ (Donaghy) dream and vision to make this happen one day. They need to take a lot of the credit for it.
Denis Donaghy (former Cairns Basketball and Taipans president): We had Rod Popp coaching the Marlins and they won state league titles in 1993 and 94 and he started talking about it. We had a look around the city and thought, of all the sports, given our size we had the best chance of getting a national team. Rod kept saying “we could be in the NBL, we could be in the NBL” so we stopped talking about it and found out what we needed to do to get there.
So the Aumuller Stfacility was fitted with airconditioning, the Marlins started hosting NBL teams in the off-season and a lobbying campaign began to convince other NBL clubs to welcome them on board.
Donaghy: We only got one vote the first time. So it was back to the drawing board.
I couldn’t even get Lindsay Gaze(Melbourne coach) to talk to me. So I recruited the help of NBA coach and executive Morris Buckwalterand basically tricked Lindsay into seeing us both.
He agreed to vote for our inclusion straight away. Bringing Bucky in was a good move.
Popp: In Cairns not a lot of people thought it would happen. We were persistent though. A number of NBL teams would play us in their pre-season and we were fortunate enough to have won a few of those games.
People really supported it then and one thing led to another.
We just had to jump through the hoops, so to speak.
Thanks to local corporate support they raised the $1.5 million required for an NBL licence and some back-and-forth with Queensland Government led to the upgrade of the Cairns Convention Centre and a few peripheral spin offs.
Popp: As it progressed I left a lot of that stuff to Denis while I focused on the basketball.
Donaghy: The Government came back to us and said they’d build stage two of the Convention Centre.
We said that’s good, but what about the people who had pledged money and were not going to see anything from it? We held the NBL licence so we went back to them, bartered for more and, to cut a long story short, we ended up getting lights and a grandstand installed at Cazalys as well.
With a stadium to play in, the NBL’s newest team had no problem building a fan base.
Donaghy: It grew out of the Marlins, the supporters and sponsors transitioned.
Back then the Marlins were huge we used to get more for an auctioned George Butlershirt than the Taipans ones go for now and we knew in time we could build that audience from 1000 to 5000.
Fearne: We had some solid crowds. We were the new kids on the block and the general public was intrigued. They got into it and had a lot of fun at the games.
Popp: I always anticipated it would work. It’s taken a few years to really get going, but it was always going to have to grow like that.
Rewarding local players who had led the Marlins to great heights, plus introducing new imports to the league, were two components of the Taipans’ pitch to enter the NBL. They couldn’t get Butler on board though, despite those closest to him supporting the move.
Popp: I couldn’t be sure why he didn’t sign.
We wanted to give those Marlins an opportunity, plus it was an Olympic year and players wanted to stay in the big market venues.
Rashamel Jones and Ricky Robinson had the same agent, they were new to the NBL and we had said we were going to target new imports, not recruit from within.
Donaghy: We wanted him (Butler) and we said we’d offer him this amount when we were able to.
But he declined.
His mother was telling him to sign but for some reason, we will never know why, he didn’t. Popp ran out of patience and we signed Jones and Robinson instead.
You could say players weren’t knocking the door down to come and play for us, but the Marlins had won national championships and people knew what Cairns was about.
Fearne: I was a development player, and didn’t start travelling with the team until the middle of that season. There was a lot of talk for years about the side and when we realised it was happening it was exciting.
The step up from ABA to NBL was tough.
Fearne: We had a lot of close finishes but we really just lacked the talent early on. There is a massive difference between the ABA and NBL.
We only won two games that season, and our first home win (against the Sydney Kings) certainly stands out for me.
We had lots of close losses early on and that just changes the mindset of the team and the fans. So when we won I think it was just relief at full-time.
Popp: Tough, we knew it would be tough. We had some very, very close games that we lost early on, plus a few injuries. We lost Troy Boundyearly in the season he was a local kid who I thought could be something really good, a bit like an Aaron Grabau.
And when you’re playing against guys like Andrew Gaze(who had 33 points against the Taipans in their first game) and Shane Healyou know it’s going to be tough.
It had to start somewhere, though.
Popp: It’s nice to look back and think we gave Grabau his first shot. It’s nice knowing I was there when he got his start, considering what he went on to be at the club. I still follow the league, and the players that we’ve had come through.
Fearne: A lot has changed, even in the last six years let alone the last 15.
The process of preparing, strength and conditioning, size, quickness, basketball IQ it’s a whole other level. Did we realise what we were in for? That’s debatable. You’re new though, you learn as you go.
From athletes who overcame the odds and battled through adversity to those who set the record books alight. These are the 50 young Aussies who made us proud throughout 2022.
Cairns Taipans player-leader Tahjere McCall has given a behind-the-scenes reveal of his team’s culture as discussions over the future of the team’s coach Adam Forde crest the horizon.
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