ABOUT GB MAXIBASKETBALL
For our more recent followers, who may not know much about our past, we thought it’d be useful to share our journey, showing how GB Maxibasketball fits into the established governance landscape for basketball, plus a commentary on what our program delivers.
Established in 2018, our early beginnings were in a school gym in East London. Since the, the GB Maxibasketball entity and brand has grown and is recognised as a national performance programme for high-level male and female players aged 35+ and upwards. It seeks to select and prepare the strongest masters teams available to compete in recognised European and World international maxibasketball tournaments, organised by the IOC-recognised International Masters Games Association (IMGA) and the independent world body that is the International Maxibasketball Federation (FIMBA).
At home, GB Maxibasketball organises regular training and selection opportunities, all supported by sports science & medicine staff, with players accessing sessions on a ‘Pay-As-You-Go’ basis. There is no subscription or membership levy. Masters level basketball in the UK is not publicly funded, so in the absence of financial sponsorship, all players and staff cover their own individual costs for training, travel and competition.
GB Maxibasketball is recognised as part of the England Talent Pathway to GB representation. We partnered with Basketball England, Basketball Scotland and Basketball Wales to promote and deliver the Tri-Nations 35+ Masters International Tournament in 2024 at the National Basketball Performance Centre in Manchester. This is the first time that the masters age group has been recognised and included in our national governing bodies’ (NGBs) mainstream international competition schedule. We will continue to work with our NGBs to embed this age group as part of their international competition strategy in future, and we continue to operate in line with their governance standards
Speaking of governance, the home nation NGBs with whom we partnered are constituent members of GB Basketball. As as member of the International Basketball Federation (FIBA), GB Basketball is responsible for GB national performance teams. FIBA also has associate membership of the IMGA who run Olympic style masters events, including basketball. The graphic below shows the basketball governance structures in the UK, as well as the international organisations that run recognised world and European masters competition.
Internationally, Great Britain joined the International Maxibasketball Federation in 2018, and is one of 72 countries represented by the individual delegates listed on the federation website. GB Maxibasketball is proud to have been the first organisation to send two British teams to compete in a FIMBA World Championship in 2019 (Espoo, Finland), one of which brought home Great Britain’s first ever world championship medal.
Since then, we have sent representative teams to consecutive FIMBA championships in 2022 in Málaga (Spain), 2023 in Mar del Plata (Argentina), and 2024 in Pesaro (Italy). GB Maxibasketball teams have won a total of eight championship medals during that time, including a gold and three silver medals. With the number of competing nations rising each year since the end of the Covid pandemic, we are very much looking forward to this summer’s exciting World Championship 2025 in Ticino, Switzerland. It will be a tough competition, but (like all teams) we hope to add to the medal tally.
Thank you for reading and hope you are a little more informed about us. 
