'A huge sense of relief': Sheffield Sharks' new Canon Medical Arena ready for historic first British Basketball League game

Asked how long the Sheffield Sharks patriarch has been waiting for a day like Sunday when his club will finally play a game in an arena of their own and quick as a flash he quips: “33 years, 248 days’.”

Not exactly the entire lifespan of the basketball club he founded as the Forgers back in 1991, but not far off.

And it’s actually more like 10 years that a purpose-built arena for his team has been something more than a pipedream.

“It’s been a decade where we’ve just worked at it and worked at it,” he tells The Yorkshire Post in the conference room of the Canon Medical Arena, a state-of-the-art facility that fuses professional and community sport with innovative healthcare.

“We didn’t think it was a dream, we knew we would get there, it was just how.”

Initially the Sharks co-owner and chairman thought it would be a public sector partnership with the city council or Sport England. When dead-ends were hit, the private sector came to the rescue.

It was a relationship nurtured by Atiba Lyons, the club’s head coach who is also a director of the Sharks and part-owner of the club, that was the genesis of the idea.

“I’m even the towel boy,” jokes Lyons. “We all muck in.”

The former player worked with Toshiba Medical, who had got involved in the Respect programme in Sheffield for children in low-advantaged backgrounds. Canon Medical took over Toshiba and in 2019, conversations began about the facility that was officially opened on Thursday.

Mark Hitchman, managing director of Canon Medical, explains: “We wanted to put our imaging facilities, diagnostics, somewhere in this space in Sheffield because we could see the Olympic Legacy Park was burgeoning. The penny dropped, why can’t we combine community welfare, diagnostics, professional sport and healthcare in one building?

“We realised we could do something special. But who’s going to pay for that?”

The final bill is £14m, all of which has been invested by Canon Medical, with the The Living Care Group reinvesting into the medical side and the Sharks paying back over a 20-year finance package.

“It has evolved through a number of like-minded people,” explains Sarah Backovic, the Sharks general manager and a key player in driving the project. “It’s never just one visionary.”

Matischen adds: “It feels unreal. I want to say joyous, but there’s a huge sense of relief that we’ve achieved this working together with Living Care and Canon Medical. They have helped us vision what we wanted to achieve and they have grafted with us.

“It shows what you can do with a partnership where larger organisations enable community-based social enterprises to lift themselves up and then in turn we lift our community up.”

Medically, the arena is a showcase for Canon Medical’s latest products and an artifical intelligence incubation hub for research and development focusing on health screening and disease prevention now and in the future.

State-of-the-art technology for diagnostic and prostate cancer screening, for instance, will be available to private patients and those on the NHS on a 50/50 basis.

From a sports patient perspective, it means clubs – like the Sharks plus Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United in the future – can not only get quicker scans to determine how long a player will be out for, but also get a greater understanding of preventing injuries in the future.

And it looks great too: modern, fresh, proportionate. It fits perfectly on the Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park which a decade ago was just the Don Valley Stadium. It was a controversial step to destroy that building but in its place is a life, science, wellbeing and sports park that should be the envy of all cities and a blueprint for future legacy projects for countries bidding for major sporting events.

In this latest phase of the project the OLP has given two nomadic professional sporting teams in rugby league’s Sheffield Eagles and basketball’s Sharks the homes they desperately craved.

Richard Caborn, the former sports minister who was behind the OLP, told The Yorkshire Post: “It’s not just the fact we have three big sports clubs playing out of here (including Sheffield Steelers), it’s the impact they’re having on the local schools, the local clubs.

“We’re hoping bit by bit we’ll encourage some of the kids at the bottom of the economic ladder they can have access to some of the best coaching and sports facilities at a reasonable cost.”

From a basketball standpoint, it is a gamechanger for the Sharks and the women’s team the Sheffield Hatters, who will both play out of the arena. Having never controlled their own venue, suddenly the Sharks can take a healthy percentage from car parking and concessions.

It has already helped in player recruitment. Bennett Koch, a forward from Wisconsin who has returned for his fifth year with the club, says: “This was absolutely a factor for me in coming back and hopefully we can pack the stands.

“We control when we practice which we never had before. We have our own space, our own locker room, which is very nice – it even has a TV in it! I feel like we have to defend this place instead of Ponds Forge which was a local gym.”

Now they need a winning product on the floor to fill those stands. A few tickets are still available for Sunday’s historic home opener against long-time British Basketball League rivals Newcastle Eagles (tip-off 3pm). Matischen would be forgiven for getting emotional. “I just want us to do a really good job,” he says.

“I hope we’re not over-anxious about playing our first game. For Atiba and the team there’s a little bit more stress than there would be in a first game of the season.

“It’s going to be a big day in many ways, it’ll be about conserving the energy and the emotions so that we perform well.

“I think all of us are going to feel it. There’s a great expectancy, we’ve got to perform well on and off the court.

“Ideally we’ll be playing in front of a couple of thousand regularly, which would double our crowd. That doesn’t happen overnight, we’ve got to build it steadily.

“But this is just the start of the journey. It’s not the end. We’re here now and we want to take off to the next level. This place will attract better players to come and play here because they will get looked after medically as well. That’s all part of what’s still to be achieved.”