By Liam Emerton
The Rockhampton Cyclones are feeling the love as their home-crowd support continues to grow after an impressive start to the NBL-1 season.
The top women’s basketball team currently sit in fourth place on the ladder having won five games and dropped two.
As their season starts to build, so does the crowd which has been continually growing at home this year.
Usually the women’s side sees the spectators start to filter in halfway through their contests but having won over their home crowd with their brilliant start to the 2023 campaign, there’s been a shift.
And that’s a massive positive for coach Drew Fenton who said the Cyclones have built off the back of that solid support.
“The women’s team especially have noticed it. Usually the crowd doesn’t start to flood in till halfway through the third quarter,” he said.
“But the last home game here, it was packed at quarter time of the women’s game.
“That’s great support. The girls love playing in front of it.
“It’s the best home court advantage in the league. It’s a cauldron where people are on top of you and teams hate coming to play here and we love that.”
Touching on the team’s great opening to 2023, Fenton said it could have been better but he is extremely pleased with how his team has been travelling.
“We’ve had a great start to the season. It was always going to be a tough start as we got our players in quite late,” he said.
“We had four of our first five on the road, but to get those wins on the road was fantastic for the group.
“Really we should have beat South-West…and even the Darwin game we were right in that.
“But overall it has been a really good start.”
Fenton spoke about the tweaks the side had to make in order to continue their winning ways with the team leading some statistics that no side with finals ambitions can afford to lead.
“Our resilience [has impressed me]. We’ve got up in games early and teams have come back at us,” he said.
“We’re really starting to find our feet, know who to get the ball to and run the right plays late in games.
“We were the highest-rated turnover team for the first three weeks but now we’ve settled down a little bit and we’re able to hold onto the ball a lot more.”
This Saturday the Cyclones will match it against the Darwin Salties who are responsible for one of the team’s two defeats this season.
With a plan in place, the Rocky women will look to lock down superstar point guard Erin Bollmann.
Bollmann scored 32 of the Salties 82 points in their win over Mackay on Saturday and led her team to the previous win over Rockhampton with a triple-double.
If the Cyclones can shut down the Salties’ playmaker then it could spell disaster for the travelling side and help our Rockhampton ladies to a big win.
The Rockhampton Rockets will also be in action this weekend when they host the Darwin Salties.
The Rockets have had a much rougher start to life in 2023, having not won a game this season.
They were knocked over against Darwin last time out but will be looking for revenge after going down 115-95 in that match.
With a rallied home crowd behind them the team will be aiming to kickstart their NBL-1 campaign this weekend after the bye.