Posted on 6 December, 2017
Ben Turner has been awarded a Kilsyth Basketball Life Membership for his outstanding and continued service to our Association and the greater basketball community.
Ben has served as a Kilsyth Basketball Director since 2011 and the Secretary of the K&MDBA since 2008, and is currently the Director of Sports Partnerships at Genius Sports. He joined Genius Sports (formally SportingPulse) in April 2011, helping grow the business from a three-employee setup in Australia to a merger with London-based Betgenius. A sports data and technology organisation, the Genius Sports group is now home to over 900 staff and 14 offices globally.
Ben co-led the successful pitch to FIFA which saw Genius Sports awarded a multi-year contract to develop and roll out FIFA Connect, a global membership system for football. In 2016, he led a team that won a development project with the NBA, and in October 2017, Genius Sports delivered a new statistics collection and distribution system for the world’s top basketball league, powering statistics for all broadcast, in-arena, digital and team analytics purposes. He is now responsible for all major sport client relationships – including the NBA and FIBA (International Basketball Federation) – as well as overseeing a team of account managers servicing 187 clients in 120 countries.
Ben has also worked alongside the FIBA team on a number of key digital, technology and data projects servicing both Membership Federations and FIBA events. Since 2011, he has overseen the use of FIBA Live Stats at over 35 International Tournaments, including the U19 World Championships, FIBA Americas Championship for Men and FIBA Asia Championships for Men.
Prior to his time at Genius Sports, Ben served as the Business Development Manager at Kilsyth Basketball from 2006-2011. Ben was responsible for a number of projects with Kilsyth Basketball, including, events, administration, sponsorships, governance, business development and IT. In addition, he was instrumental in developing, maintaining and gaining large sponsorships, in particular the overwhelmingly popular ‘Kids First’ schools basketball program, which has reached out to over 30,000 Primary School students annually since inception. During this time, Ben was also a recipient of Basketball Victoria’s prestigious ‘Administrator of the Year’ award.
Ben has also worked with the YMCA in various roles, with Basketball Victoria as the Aussie Hoops/Athletes with a Disability Coordinator, and has served as a volunteer coach for the Kilsyth Cobras Junior and Senior programs. An Assistant Coach with the Victorian Metro Under 16 and 18 Girl’s National Championship-winning State Teams from 2007-2009, Ben was also an Assistant Coach with the Kilsyth Lady Cobras SEABL Program from 2012 to 2015 and has coached a number of Junior Cobras Girls teams over the past 10 years.
Ben joins long-time volunteer Lynda Spicer as a 2017 Life Member recipient. We would like to thank Ben for his exemplary service to Kilsyth Basketball and congratulate him on his Life Membership.
