Where do you play basketball after 18?

By Andrew Smith, CEO and Founder at SPORTA

It’s mocks season.

In schools across the country, Year 11s are sitting exams in the sports hall, at rows of desks laid out where the court should be. That means no PE, no after-school sessions and no club nights for at least two weeks.

If you’ve never played or coached indoor sport in the UK, that might sound like a minor inconvenience. If you have, you’ll know what it means. Every basketball club that rents a school hall has just lost its home for a fortnight, and often nobody thought to tell them.

I spent many years playing and coaching basketball, so I know those halls well, from the smell of the place to the caretaker with the keys. In this blog I want to use basketball as a case study, because I think it shows more clearly than any other sport what happens when a country loves a game but doesn’t build anywhere to play it.

The drop-off at 18

The demand is there.

According to Sport England’s latest figures, nearly 1.1 million children aged 5 to 16 play basketball every week, which makes it the second most-played team sport among under-16s after football.

The adult picture is very different. Around 320,000 people aged 16 and over played basketball at least twice in the last 28 days. The two figures come from different surveys with different definitions of regular participation, so they aren’t a precise like-for-like comparison, but the direction is clear.

That’s roughly a million children, and then a fraction of that number as adults. It’s a pattern I’ve seen for most of my life. The sport is hugely popular with young people and then it falls away.

I don’t think that’s because basketball stops being appealing at 18. I think it’s because we give people nowhere to go, for two reasons, and neither has anything to do with the game itself.

Reason one: there’s no pyramid

Once you turn 18, where do you play?

In football the answer is obvious. There are academies, scouts and programmes that take talent from the park to the professional game. The system isn’t perfect, but it gives young players something to aim for and adult players somewhere to play.

Basketball has some adult teams, though not many, and a top tier, Super League Basketball, which has ten clubs this season now that Liverpool has joined. For a sport with more than a million children playing it, that is the entire visible professional route, and it can’t grow to meet that demand.

It’s worth looking at how the top of the pyramid is built elsewhere. The NBA is a closed league with no promotion or relegation, but underneath it sits the G League and a wider system of development basketball, each level with its own degree of professionalism. Mac McClung is a good example. He won the NBA Slam Dunk Contest three years running and is one of the best-known names in the sport, but he has spent most of his career in the G League, with only a handful of NBA appearances along the way. That system gave him somewhere to play, learn and earn a living while he worked his way up.

In the UK, a talented 19-year-old has very few of those rungs to climb. The best go abroad, some get picked up by a handful of teams, and the rest stop playing.

Even the clubs that do make it to a national league then run into the second problem.

Reason two: there’s nowhere to play

Most basketball clubs in this country don’t have their own facility. The handful that do tend to be connected to Super League clubs. Everyone else is choosing between a local leisure centre and a school hall.

Leisure centres understandably want to earn as much as they can from their main hall, but that usually puts weekly hire, let alone several nights a week, out of reach for a small club. So most clubs end up in school halls.

School halls are poor places to play basketball. They almost never have a sprung wooden floor, which makes a real difference to players’ joints. I played on those floors for years and I blame them for a good share of the ankle and knee problems I still have, and I know plenty of former players who would say the same.

Injuries aside, the bigger problem is weeks like this one.

Once the hall fills with exam desks, the school’s own sport stops, and so does every club that rents the space. There’s no training and there are no fixtures. Mocks take at least two weeks in most schools, there are more exams in the new year, and then there are the end-of-year exams for every age group.

By my count, that’s close to eight weeks of the season lost to the school calendar. A club’s playing year is fewer than forty weeks long, so a fifth of it disappears every year, and clubs get no say in it.

It tells you that sport is treated as an afterthought, and I don’t think that’s acceptable.

Why this matters beyond basketball

We know what sport does for people. It builds discipline and resilience, it keeps people physically healthy, and it gives them a group to belong to. It teaches you how to win and, more usefully, how to lose.

For me it goes further. I’m neurodiverse, and for people like me sport is about much more than competing. It’s a form of therapy and a way of regulating my mind. I know from experience what time on a court does for a head that won’t stay still, and if you take the court away, you take that away too.

Multiply that across the 1.1 million children who play, and the clubs losing their space for two months a year, and you have a national problem. Basketball is just where I see it most clearly.

I expect some people will say money is tight. Arenas and campuses are expensive, schools are already stretched and every pound has plenty of other claims on it. You could argue that sharing school facilities is the efficient answer, and that clubs should be grateful for the access.

I think that misses the bigger picture. A school hall is built for assemblies and PE lessons, and it can be taken back whenever the exam timetable needs it. Having access to one is useful, but it isn’t something a club can build its future on.

The efficient answer may well be the opposite one. A single campus used all year round by many sports, clubs, schools and elite teams is far more cost-effective than a dozen badly suited halls, each trying to do a bit of everything.

What we should build

My hope is that we get much smarter about how we invest in sport, and that basketball becomes the case study that helps us get there.

Why don’t we invest in sports arenas and campuses? I mean places that can host basketball, handball, badminton and many other sports, that elite teams and schools can both use, and, most importantly, where clubs can have a home all year round without the school calendar getting in the way.

Better facilities would let more clubs reach more children. More of those children would carry on playing as adults, and more adult players means more leagues, more competition and a stronger game overall. A more active population also brings better physical and mental health, less anti-social behaviour and youth crime, and less pressure on NHS waiting lists. Sport England estimates that every £1 invested in community sport and physical activity generates £4.38 in value for individuals and society (Sport and Physical Activity, November 2025 update).

From there we can look at the Super League, at investing in professionalism further down the game, and at building multiple leagues that form a proper pyramid, so that a talented 19-year-old has a reason to stay.

Nobody in this country stops liking basketball when they turn 18. There just isn’t anywhere to watch it, let alone play it. The demand, the engagement and the enjoyment are all there, otherwise it wouldn’t be one of the biggest sports our children play.

Give sport a home

Plenty of people want to play basketball. What’s missing is a pathway for them to follow and premises to play in, and both of those can be fixed.

So let’s build somewhere for them to play.

—

Sources: Sport England, Active Lives Adult Survey (November 2024 to November 2025) and Children and Young People Survey (academic year 2024-25), as reported by Basketball England (31 May 2026); Super League Basketball (ten clubs, 2026-27 season); ESPN (13 February 2026) on Mac McClung; Sport England, Sport and Physical Activity (November 2025 update) on social return on investment. Club finance figures are from SPORTA’s own research.