Triple Threat Philosophy
"Skill Development, Community Building, and Elite Competition, all in Harmony"
The Academy
Triple Threat Basketball is a girls development academy for players of every skill and experience level, Grades 3–8, in Victoria, BC.
We are a girls basketball program committed to creating a welcoming environment for every athlete. If your child is non-binary or transgender and is interested in participating, please reach out to Coach Rob to discuss your particular situation.
Night League club player, school-team player, or never played on a team before? Whatever your daughter’s background, she is welcome in our programs. We are not exclusive. For players who do belong to a club, we have designed our programs to complement and not conflict with those commitments — in fact, we highly encourage all of our players to play for their local club or school team, and join Triple Threat for additional training.
Triple Threat provides Skill Development training sessions for players at U10 (Grades 3–4), U12 (Grades 5–6), and U14 (Grades 7–8). Our U11 (2016), U12 (2015), U13 (2014), and U14 (2013) travel teams compete in leagues and tournaments in Greater Vancouver and on Vancouver Island.
Your Holidays Are Your Own
Triple Threat believes that family time is important. We will never schedule any practices or games on holidays, long weekends, or school breaks.
What We Teach
The goal of our Skill Development training sessions is to provide players with a detailed, developmentally-appropriate grasp of all the fundamental individual basketball skills: shooting, driving, cutting, pivoting, dribbling, passing, rebounding and defending. Players will graduate from our programs as complete basketball players, ready for their next challenge.
Triple Threat runs competitive travel teams at U11, U12, U13, and U14. Players on our travel teams receive extra instruction in advanced skill development, as well as a thorough grounding in all of the standard offensive, defensive and transition team formations and tactics.
Community, Continuity, Development
Triple Threat values community, continuity, and development. Girls in our programs are taught team building skills, interpersonal skills, and leadership skills. All four of our travel teams practice together, cheer for each other, and collaborate with each other. Players from different age groups are often brought up or down an age group to have new experiences with the other teams in our program. Players who are among the strongest in their age group will have the opportunity to receive extra training with the older age groups.
Continuity on our travel teams is incredibly important at Triple Threat. Working with kids at this developmental age, we are constantly building and layering skills on top of other skills. Keeping the same group of players together from season to season and year to year really allows us to accelerate their growth.
We build our travel team rosters to stay together. The goal is to keep turnover between seasons to a minimum. Adding many new players each season creates a hard learning curve for the new players, and the lack of continuity is unfair to the players who have stayed committed to the program.
Our Commitment to Travel Team Players
Our goal is for all our travel team players to play with us for multiple years. Players on our travel teams are guaranteed a spot on next year's team so long as they:
- maintain 80% attendance at practices,
- maintain 80% attendance at games,
- are a great teammate, and
- are receptive to coaching.
New Players Also Welcome
Our travel team roster sizes grow slightly as age groups progress, creating space for one or two new additions each year.
Who We Are
Triple Threat has a clear identity grounded in development, community and continuity. Our programs are designed to support our girls through a multi-year process where they can learn age-appropriate basketball skills and strategies at the developmentally appropriate time.
Our travel teams compete with fierce joy, but not at the expense of community building and skill development.
Club Founder and Head Coach Rob Wighton has found working with development-aged girls to be the most rewarding phase of his 35-year coaching career. Typically programs assign more junior coaches to the developmental levels. However at Triple Threat, you have a highly experienced and passionate top-tier coach devoted to working exclusively with the Gr 3-8 age group.
Who We Are Not
Many academy programs build their primary philosophy and identity around winning. Triple Threat is not one of them.
Flaws in Winning-First Programs
- Unstable foundations. The top-tier players are constantly leaving to pursue even more competitive opportunities, while the culture of hyper-competitiveness drives the lower-tier players away from the program.
- Constant recruitment. A program built purely around winning has to constantly demonstrate that it can keep winning in order to keep recruiting new players, and gets caught up in the churn of roster turnover.
- Shortcut coaching. The pressure for immediate success leads directly to tactics and strategies that win now but aren't developmentally appropriate for the age group (e.g. full court zone presses). Development is neglected. Team building is neglected.
- Misplaced resources. Coaching resources get poured into the oldest age groups, and often more into the boys programs because those programs get the most attention. Development-aged girls often are neglected.
Triple Threat Basketball Academy exists to give girls in Victoria a development-first safe space to shine.