Gold Coast Rollers

The Gold Coast Rollers is a basketball team that has competed in Australia's National Basketball League (NBL) and currently competes in the Queensland Basketball League (QBL). The team plays their home games at The Southport School main court. In 2007–08, due to the work of former Rollers coach David Claxton, a new Gold Coast team, the Gold Coast Blaze, entered the NBL.

The Gold Coast Goannas were renamed the Gold Coast Rollers for the 2011 QBL season, taking on the same colours and logo that the mid 1990s NBL team used.

NBL

Based in Gold Coast, Queensland, the team was originally named the Gold Coast Cougars before being renamed the Rollers for the 1992 season. The team was one of only two teams from the state of Queensland when it first joined the NBL (the Brisbane Bullets being the other). The Rollers were one of three teams (the Geelong Supercats and the Hobart Devils being the other two) that had their NBL licenses revoked by the league directors in 1997 due to financial difficulties.

Gold Coast

Gold Coast may refer to:

Places

Africa

Gold Coast 600

The Gold Coast 600 is an annual V8 Supercars event held each October at the Surfers Paradise Street Circuit in Surfers Paradise, Queensland, Australia. The race is currently known for sponsorship reasons as the Castrol Gold Coast 600, and was formerly known as the V8 Supercar Challenge. from 1997 to 2009.

First run in 1994, the event was a support race to the Gold Coast Indy 300 until its demise in 2009.

History

Background

The Gold Coast, of which Surfers Paradise is a suburb, had long had an association with touring cars through Surfers Paradise International Raceway in the suburb of Carrara. The track held numerous rounds of the Australian Touring Car Championship (ATCC), the previous incarnation of V8 Supercars, between 1969 and 1987.

CART event support

The Gold Coast Indy 300 was first run in 1991, however it was not until 1994 that touring cars joined the event. The event, featuring cars from the ATCC, was run as a non-championship exhibition round, supporting the then CART FedEx Championship Series event. In the next two years, cars from the two-litre Australian Super Touring Championship were a support category at the event; in 1995 as the sole touring car category and in 1996 one of two touring car support categories alongside the return of the ATCC cars. Greg Murphy won the Super Touring event in both years for Brad Jones Racing. From 1997 onwards, the event returned to solely featuring five-litre ATCC cars, the category that was now known as V8 Supercars. The 1998 event was notable for providing Mark Larkham with the only event win of his decade-long full-time touring car career, albeit at a non-championship event. Due to the often crash-filled nature of the rounds, its non-championship status and the relatively quick turn-around time between the event and the Bathurst 1000, some teams used older model cars at the event, such as in 1999 when Paul Radisich won the event with a 1998-spec Ford EL Falcon, instead of their usual AU Falcon.

Gold Coast, Queensland

Gold Coast is a coastal city in southeastern Queensland on the east coast of Australia. It is the second most populous city in the state, the sixth most populous city in the country, and the most populous non-capital city and cross-state metropolitan area in Australia. The city's northernmost point at Ormeau is located 42 kilometres south-east of the Brisbane central business district, and the metropolitan area extends south along the coast to Tweed Heads, New South Wales. The Gold Coast metropolitan area converges with that of Greater Brisbane, forming part of an urban conurbation of over 3 million people.

The first settlement in what is now South East Queensland was as a penal colony at Redcliffe. The Gold Coast region remained largely uninhabited by Europeans until 1823 when explorer John Oxley landed at Mermaid Beach. The hinterland's red cedar supply attracted people to the area in the mid-19th century. Later in 1875, Southport was surveyed and established and grew a reputation as a secluded holiday destination for wealthy Brisbane residents.