SINGAPORE – The Basketball Association of Singapore’s (BAS) newly appointed chief executive Leon Neo knows he has a sizeable task ahead of him in lifting morale and raising funds for the governing body.
At the Phnom Penh SEA Games in May, the men’s 5x5 side lost three out of four games and finished seventh out of eight teams while their female counterparts lost all six matches and were last of seven teams. In the 3x3 events, the Republic were last in both the men and women’s categories, having each lost all three of their matches.
Neo, 47, started his new role on Wednesday, replacing James Soh, 40, who was hired in March 2022.
Neo, who was previously a sports performance manager for nine years at Sport Singapore, said: “We are not quite happy with the outcome but we still believe that we can one day win back the medals at the SEA Games.
“Building a high-performance system is not something we can do overnight. It requires the collective efforts of everyone to work towards a common shared vision.”
He is also seeking greater financial support and believes the association has under-utilised the potential of the One Team Singapore Fund (OTSF) in the past year. The OTSF is an initiative launched by national agency SportSG, which offers one-for-one matching grants from the Government, capped at $50 million over five years, for donations to national sporting associations.
Neo said: “We’ve had zero donations for the past six months and my immediate task is to build on this.”
According to BAS’ financial reports, it got nothing from the OTSF in the 2022-23 financial year, compared to $110,703 in the previous period. That amount, however, made up just over 4 per cent of the $2,566,051 in funds available to BAS in 2021-22.
Neo has therefore reached out to private entities and various partners. He said: “We currently have some good sponsors and partners and we hope that we can build stronger relationships with them.
“We are looking for business partners who are interested in walking this journey with us, so let’s build a win-win collaboration together.”
He noted that in the last financial report, BAS received $800,000 in cash from SportSG but that goes towards supporting their headcount, office space and national training programmes. Another $400,000 are facility grants which are non-cash components.
Neo said: “We need more cash flow to fund our development programmes. We cannot fully rely on Sport Singapore’s funding as we need more than that and we are striving to be self-sustainable in future.”
BAS has set out fund-raising plans for 2024. “In the coming months we’re going to beef up donation drives, campaigns and fund-raising dinners,” he added. “We have a list of planned events, courses, competitions, workshops laid out in our whole year calendar and all these require resources to fund.”
BAS’ secretary-general Kelvin Tan is confident that Neo will succeed in leading the sport forward. He said: “His extensive experience in the sports scene, coupled with his personal passion for cultivating a positive and communal culture around it, is truly admirable.”
