JackJumpers will move its headquarters to a new high performance centre in Kingborough

As construction gets underway on the JackJumpers high performance centre, the NBL team boss has delivered a surprising piece of news about the budget for the facility.

Tasmania JackJumpers boss Christine Finnegan is hopeful the new high performance centre at Kingston can take the club to “another level”.

Construction is officially underway on the state of the art facility at Kingston which the JackJumpers and Kingston council expect will come in under the $15m budget.

The facility will see the franchise’s front office and training facility now in one location.

Finnegan said the project is expected to take about 12 months to complete.

“The budget was the budget and I am very pleased to say that we won’t be seeking any more money for this project,” Finnegan said.

Jack the Jumper inspects the new plans for the Tasmania JackJumpers high performance centre with CEO Christine Finnegan. Picture: Jake Garland

“We are working to make sure that it comes in under what it is being projected.”

“For our basketball program, this is taking us to the next level and we are striving to be the best team in the NBL.

“The most sought after team, a destination club and this plays a major factor in that.

“It’s just great synergy when you’re under one roof and the barriers are the travel time that it takes between and that we don’t see each other every day.

“There is no doubt that in high performance environments, it’s very good when the front office and the back office and everybody come together for the bigger picture.”

Finnegan, along with the council have continually worked on the community aspect of the new facility over the past 18 months and what it will look like.

Tasmania JackJumpers new high performance centre will be built at Kingston. Picture: Jake Garland

“It’s about people in the schools wanting to come and tour what a high performance facility looks like,” Finnegan said.

“Access our high performance team and our coaches and our front office expertise in terms of that.

“So we’ve got a number of plans that we want to integrate into that plan and we’ll be evolving that over the next 12 months.”

The Tasmania Devils AFL team will be located next door in what Finnegan was a win for the state.

“It’s amazing, some of the great sporting precincts in Australia and the world have multi sports working out of one location,” Finnegan said.

“On the December 22, two years ago, I made the call to Paula (Kingston Mayor) when the AFL centre was in doubt coming here as to whether she would look at us being a possibility to come here.

“Very quickly the Kingborough council responded to that and I think it was in a six month process that everybody, all stakeholders got together and we decided this was the right site.”

Kingborough mayor Paula Wriedt said she thought the phone call from Finnegan was a joke.

“The 22nd of December, two years ago was a very interesting day because that morning I received a phone call from the state government to say we had not been successful in securing the AFL high performance centre,” Wriedt said.

“It went from being a really horrible day to then about four hours later, flipping on its head with this random phone call from the JackJumpers to say would I consider having it.

“I was like, is this a joke? And as it turned out, I couldn’t imagine then, two years later, we’d be standing here about to put a shovel in the ground for the JackJumpers high performance centre.”