After working together once more as coaches at the Perth Lynx, Brad Robbins and Nat Burton will team up as head coach and senior player this NBL1 West season at the Warwick Senators, and both of them can't wait.
Robbins and Burton have now been assistant coaches in the WNBL at the Perth Lynx for the past three seasons. That's been a period of great success with Ryan Petrik as head coach with two Grand Final appearances, and another playoff berth in between.
While there is an element of heartbreak to those two Grand Final series losses at the Lynx for the pair especially with the 2024 version still so fresh in the memory, they have quickly turned their attention to getting the NBL1 West season underway at the Senators.
Warwick won both the NBL1 West and NBL National Championship back in 2022 and while their 2023 season never fully got going, they still got to the second round of the playoffs before losing to the Rockingham Flames.
Life with Robbins as head coach now gets underway for the Senators on Thursday night in the season-opener for 2024 against the East Perth Eagles at Warwick Stadium.
Brad Robbins
Robbins is coming into his first season as head coach at the Senators but he brings with him quite the basketball resume into the role.
A promising junior, Robbins was part of the storied Australian Emus team that won a World Championship back in 2003 before embarking on his NBL career that saw him end up winning a championship and becoming captain at the Perth Wildcats.
He is also a championship winner with the Joondalup Wolves in the SBL in 2011 and in more recent years has started his journey into coaching that included a stint in charge at the Lady Wolfpack in 2018 and then moving into the assistant role in the WNBL at the Lynx.
All you need to have done at some point over the past 15 years is talk to Robbins for five minutes about basketball and it would be obvious that he sees the game in every way that would make him a natural coach.
He now gets to put that to the test at the Senators and he couldn’t be happier with the playing group that he will have to work with that is headed up by a strong core group including Burton along with Stacey Barr, Nicole Jorre de St Jorre, Chloe Forster and returning import forward Karly Murphy.
There also the ultra-talented Isabelle Miotti on board and an exciting young group headed up by Kyana Weir, Alyssa Duncan, Katie Cummins and Alaska Rhebok that is giving Robbins a great sense of excitement coming into the season.
"I'm really excited with the team we've put together," Robbins said.
"The reality is that I've been watching this group for a few years now mainly due to the connection that I've obviously got with Chloe, Nat and Mackenzie from the Lynx.
"So I've always kept tabs on them and have been watching them, and I guess I had a fair idea of what I could expect coming into the position in that regard. For me it was a no brainer to try and retain everybody that we could, and then build from there.
"Our bench will be quite young and we did have a couple of others we intended to recruited that fell through, but it is what it is. We have a really nice mixture of youth and of senior players, and we're looking to still potentially sign another person which we're hopeful about."
While preparations for an NBL1 season can never be perfect particularly when you have players part of the WNBL set up, you have imports not yet arrived and any other sort of challenges, Robbins has no complaints about how ready his Warwick team are coming into the 2024 campaign.
"Our preparations have gone as well as you could have hoped and I always knew coming in for us that our pre-season would be slightly disrupted," Robbins said.
"At NBL level, you've typically got all your pieces in place for pre-season and everyone's relatively healthy and you can get all the training done you want heading into game one.
"But it isn’t the same in NBL1 where Chloe was tied up with Lynx and couldn’t train with us, we haven’t got Karly in at the moment and that depends on when she finishes up where she's playing over Europe, and then of course there's niggles here and there for the girls who have been training.
"We've put in the work that we can put in but still have a lot more to put in, but at the same time we don't want to focus too far ahead or how it's looking right now. We want to focus on the process of where we want to get to and the things that we can control, and then we'll be fine in the long run."
Nat Burton
Now after working together so closely on another Lynx season as assistant coaches, it's a different relationship but an equally effective one with Burton going back into senior player role at the Senators and Robbins as the head coach.
Burton has retired from playing basketball professionally after a remarkable career that saw her spend four years at West Virginia University after growing up in Perth, and then having a standout career.
That included stints in the WNBL at the West Coast Waves/Perth Lynx, Melbourne Boomers and Sydney Uni Flames along with playing in Germany and France which saw her win a DBBL championship in 2019.
In between, she would continually come back to play with her local club, the Perry Lakes Hawks, and she was a big part of their SBL championship in 2017 before it was a fresh start she was after following the end of her professional career.
She joined the Senators in 2022 and was part of immediate success with the NBL1 West and National Championship triumphs, and playing at NBL1 level while beginning her coaching journey and player mentoring career is the perfect fit for her.
She's also looking forward to now playing under Robbins after the pair have worked so closely together at the Lynx the last three years, and is excited for how the 2024 season is shaping up for the Senators.
"It was a bit funny at first going from working together as coaches to then having him coaching me, but I've been really enjoying being able to turn that part of my brain off once we get to training and just worrying about playing," Burton said.
"The fact that I still get to do that is something I'm grateful for so I really am trying to make the most of it because I know that there's not long left in my playing days.
"So that's been really good and it has also been good that Brad and I have that relationship from working together at the Lynx for a few years now.
"It's still kind of a working collaboration which is really fun and I think we've got a good group at the Senators this year. We're all on the same page and I'm really excited for what we can achieve this year, I think we can achieve some really good things."
