Clarke always thankful to WAIS Warriors

The WAIS Warriors might have only existed in the SBL for three seasons, but Troy Clarke credits the club's existence to setting up the rest of his career in the now NBL1 West that saw him retire the games record holder and league-leader in assists.

The Warriors might be a largely forgotten part of the history of the league that started as the SBL back in 1989 and has now transformed into the NBL1 West, but they played a crucial part in the formative years for a host of players like Clarke.

As part of the West Australian Institution of Sport, the idea behind the Warriors was similar to what Basketball Australia now has with the Centre of Excellence to bring the best young players all together in the one team to hasten their development, and then test them against senior teams.

The Centre of Excellence are currently playing in the NBL1 East just as the WAIS Warriors did for the first three years in the SBL from 1989-91.

Winning games wasn’t commonplace and they did in fact only win eight of their 74 matches in those three seasons including going 0-26 before winding up at the end of 1991, but it was about much more than that.

That's why Clarke will be forever grateful to the two seasons he spent on that WAIS team in 1990 and 1991 before going on to win a championship back with the Cockburn Cougars in 1992, and finishing up his career with a then record 512 games and 2773 assists.

WAIS setting up rest of career

Clarke started his career with Cockburn and having lived just down the road from Wally Hagan Stadium that was only natural, but when Warriors coach Warren Kuhn invited him to join the WAIS team for 1990, he jumped at the chance.

And upon reflection, those two years playing under Kuhn and developing in that environment with the Warriors is what Clarke credits a lot to what he would go on to achieve.

"It just set me on a mental path on playing against anyone and how to go about it, and I remember times at playing at WAIS and you might take a look at the size of some of the Americans you'd come up against and you'd think you were in for it," Clarke said.

"But once you started playing, you would just back yourself to take them on and from a mental aspect thanks to that you were a bit one step ahead because you had that confidence thank to the program you were part of.

"So I don’t know if I would have ever got to be in that mindset had I not had that time at WAIS."

The existence of the WAIS Warriors

Clarke feels even though the WAIS Warriors didn’t win a lot of games with the 6-16 record in 1989, 2-24 in 1990 and then 0-26 in 1991, that it played an important role in setting up young players to be ready to play senior basketball moving forward.

The Warriors played out of the University of WA and played in the green, gold, black and white colours, and while Clarke is the leading light in terms of playing to come out of them to achieve great things, he was far from the only one.

There was also the likes of Brad Counsel (269 games), Adrian Thompson (138), Paul Gouteff (164), Brendan MacDonald (204), Colin Dempster (153), Ron Fris (206), Stephen Jose (205), Tim Feldhusen (155) and Warren Hampson (124).

Clarke feels it was a terrific concept and will always be thankful to be part of it.

"The team was fantastic and the concept was brilliant because what it did was help a lot of juniors that had a bit of talent be selected to be put into a team together to develop that would compete in the SBL," Clarke said.

"So we were thrown in the deep end to find out if you could sink or swim, and it provided a great pathway.

"When we finished at WAIS, you were basically walking into a starting five position at your club of choice, or local club, because you were developed and had that year or two under your belt in the SBL.

"It was brilliant and a great path to get into the state leagues, and I got selected to be part of it in 1990 by the coach Warren Kuhn and from there he offered me a spot on the team for a couple of years.

"I was captain in the second year and we didn’t win a game, but after that I went back to Cockburn in 1992 and we won the grand final."

Being coached by Warren Kuhn

The coach of that Warriors team and the whole program was Warren Kuhn who has gone on to create a legacy as one of WA basketball's great innovative coaches and basketball minds. Clarke has no doubt he was the perfect man to be in charge at WAIS.

"Warren was great. He's passionate and he knew the game, and it's a totally different game today to what it was back then," Clarke said.

"At that time, there wasn’t a three-point line and it was more a running game and a lot quicker and we'd score a lot more points because you're attacking the basket a lot more and not pulling up to shoot as much.

"He is one of the best coaches I had I suppose from Greg Gurr in that championship team of 1992, and he was a fantastic communicator.

"Warren was an especially fantastic big man coach and that helped me learn how to play with big guys, and develop that sense of knowing where to get them the ball and that helped me so much for the rest of my career. He was a great influence on me and has a great legacy to the game."

Returning to Cockburn and creating legacy

It was always Clarke's plan to return to the Cougars once his time at WAIS ended and his timing couldn’t have been more perfect to be back at Cockburn in 1992 for the 1992 SBL championship.

He would also be part of grand final teams in 1993 and 1998, and there's nowhere else he would have ever wanted to play.

Just getting to play with Cockburn was all the reward he ever needed, but to end up a championship winner and with his photo up on the Wally Hagan Stadium wall as a life member topped things off nicely on top of all his other accomplishments.

"I'm a dedicated club person so given I had started at Cockburn, I was always going to come back once I finished at WAIS," Clarke said.

"I didn’t want to play anywhere else and that basically cemented my career, and I just kept playing. I just played for the love of the game, and there was only one year that I was paid $1000 and that was it.

"I never asked to be paid but the board came up and said they wanted to pay me to pay for that season, but that was it and that was the one and only time I was paid to play. I was never thinking of going to another club and I'm very proud of what I ended up achieving with Cockburn."

Honours by the end of career

By the time Clarke retired for good in the 2009 season, he did so having played 512 games in the SBL. That was a record that stood all the way until the end of the 2023 NBL1 West season when Seb Salinas surpassed it ironically playing for Kalamunda against Cockburn on Troy Clarke Court.

Clarke also finished his career as the all-time assists leader having dished out 2773 of them throughout his 512-game career with an average of 5.4 a game.

That was also overtaken by Joel Wagner at the Perth Redbacks back in 2019, but really, the ultimate honour that Clarke will always cherish is knowing that the main court at Wally Hagan Stadium has since been named in his honour.

"Then getting the court named after me was icing on the cake in a sense once my career had finished," Clarke said.

"I was always quite a humble player and I never needed gratitude or anything, and just being able to play was all that I needed but to have a court named after me was just the icing on the cake of the dream I was able to live playing at Cockburn.

"Even to have my kids go down and see my name on the court and there are so many faces that have changed down at Cockburn now so a lot of people might not even know what I look like, but they'll always know my name thanks to that, and it just cements great memories that I've had down there."

Staying as connected as possible still

Clarke is kept busy with his own IT business, TC PC Services, along with his family and also living north of the river means he might not get to the court named after him as much as he would like, but that connection still to Cockburn will last a lifetime.

"I do have a business and I live north of the river so it's hard to get down there as much as I'd like, but I do try and get down to a couple of games a year at least," Clarke said.

"It's something you are never going to forget and I would never have dreamed of playing anywhere. Firstly I lived just down the road near Phoenix Shopping Centre so that helped, I used to ride my bike down there to shoot on the back courts.

"I even had my first dunk on Court 2 down there and there's a lot of memories I have that will last a lifetime. More than anything, it's the people you meet along the journey that are lifelong friends when you think of people like Pete Stanley, the Bakers and the list goes on.

"You can never take those connections away, I just wish there was more vision of our games back then that we could look back on or show our kids. I'm very jealous of everything that is available to the players today."