Neptune

Neptune is the only basketball club in Ireland that owns its arena. The building on Gerald Griffin Street, in Blackpool, Cork, stages MMA fights and concerts as well as basketball.

The club began in 1947, when members of the Irish Defence Forces were helping to set up citizens' clubs. Men from the Naval Service in Cork, among them Humphrey Lynch, the first chairman, Tossy Brunton and Jimmy Roche, gave Neptune its shape. It became the first independent civilian club in the country.

The arena opened on New Year's Day 1985, in the middle of the run that made the club. Playing as Burgerland Neptune, backed by the Irish investor Jackie Solan and built around the American import Terry Strickland, it won seven league titles between 1983 and 1991. Pete Strickland, a player-coach who recruited Americans for the club, was known in the early 1980s as the "Pied Piper" of Neptune. He later became head coach of the Irish national team. The year the stadium opened, Neptune won both the league and the cup, and it took the cup again in 1988, 1990 and 1992.

The league titles kept coming through the 1990s, when Stephen "Stadser" McCarthy captained the side. The most recent came in 2003 under Martin "Ernie" Aherne, the coach who had been a Neptune player. That was the eleventh in all.

The cup returned in 2013, and in 2017 Neptune won the Hula Hoops Presidents Cup. The American Lehmon Colbert then served as player-coach from 2018 to 2020.