Parkinson to celebrate 300 and step aside

Tom Parkinson will celebrate his 300th NBL1 West game on Saturday night and it will be his last as he makes the transition to the Lakeside Lightning coaching staff while he and wife Tia prepare to become parents for the first time.

Parkinson was hoping to get in his 300-game milestone last season and he would have done if the Lightning were able to make finals. It looked like that was possible as they built some late season momentum.

However, facing the regular season champion Rockingham Flames in their last two games proved a hurdle too far. That left Parkinson stranded on 299 games by the end of the 2025 season and in somewhat of a quandary.

He didn’t want to play on just to reach the 300-game milestone, but new Lightning coach Steve Bezant was able to talk him around and Parkinson has prepared himself for a full season.

That's not going to be the case, though, and his one and only time pulling on the purple uniform in 2026 will be on Saturday night at the Lakeside Recreation Centre so he can reach the 300-game mark.

From there, he will remain involved with the Lightning on the coaching staff. It's the start of a big year for himself and wife, former player and current Cockburn Cougars chief executive Tia Ucich, as they welcome a daughter to become parents for the first time come August.

Looking forward to 300th and last game

Saturday night is going to be a night for Parkinson to savour for so many reasons. He's rightfully proud to reach the 300-game mark in the NBL1 West with all but 24 of them having been at the Lightning where he made his debut back in 2010.

He did have one season with the Joondalup Wolves in 2022 so it's only fitting they are the opponents on Saturday too, but it's Lakeside that's always home for him.

"I'm excited and it's going to be really nice," Parkinson said.

"There's a whole bunch of old teammates and friends and family coming to watch which will be really cool, and it will be great to catch up with everybody that I haven’t seen for a long time.

"It will be really good to pause and reflect on the career that I've had, but it's also really exciting that the season is getting underway and it will be nice to be involved for one last time."

Making the ultimate decision

At the end of last season, Parkinson was fairly sure he was going to retire and then he had a broken finger during pre-season that gave him some more time to think about the decision.

In the end, good friend Steve Bezant appointed coach lit a fire somewhat under Parkinson to want to remain involved but he was still pretty sure he didn’t want to fully commit to playing especially if it meant taking minutes and a role from a developing big on the roster.

So it was more of a selfless decision to step aside to not be in the way of anyone's development. He wanted to remain involved to join Bezant's coaching staff, but he was able to be convinced to suit up once more to not be stranded on the 299 games.

"My thinking was to just stay ready just in case and I finished last year pretty certain that I wasn’t going to play but pretty early on in the piece Lakeside said that we'd love to see you get to 300 and to have some sort of celebration of the career and to achieve the milestone," Parkinson said.

"So I always kept myself open to that and as soon as I found out Steve was going to be coaching that made the decision a lot easier. Steve has worked at Lakeside previously when I was playing about 10 years ago when he was the GM for a pretty long stint so I already had a strong relationship with Steve.

"I was happy to see him named as coach because we used to chat all the time when he was GM and I was captain back then. So we just had some great conversations throughout the off-season about what the team was going to look like, what he was going to do with imports, what the young guys were going to do and who might come across from other clubs.

"I just said to him that I was here if he needed me, and I'm preparing my body to play, but I'm on the side of not wanting. He just told me to start pre-season once my broken finger healed and we kept having chats along the way about how things were tracking, and we both agreed there was no real need for another big around especially one who is 37.

"We were both pretty happy with the decision for me to move into the coaching staff and try to add some value in that sense."

Rare company as 300-game Lakeside player

The 300-game milestone for Lakeside players is a rare feat and in fact only one man has achieved the mark solely playing for the Lightning. That just happens to be the lone man with his number retired, legendary rebounder Jarrad Prue.

But Parkinson sits behind Prue on the all-time games played list for Lakeside's men and now joins Steve Butler, Seva Chan, Michael Vigor, Kyle Armour and Austin Bruton as players who have played at least part of their careers with the Lightning and reached 300 games.

"I hadn’t thought about it like that but I am proud from that side of it and those are some pretty accomplished players so to be alongside them will be pretty cool," Parkinson said.

"I am proud of what I've been able to achieve, though, and it's taken a lot of hard work and a lot of long hours, a lot of gym sessions and all that sort of stuff.

"I've made some incredible friendships and obviously met Tia through playing basketball so I've loved every minute of it.

"It's been fantastic and now playing the last game is a little bit emotional moving away from the game and you're a long time retired, and I know I'm going to miss it, and I love the game so much.

"I'm going to have periods where I'm wishing I could be back out there, but I've nothing but joy about the career that I've had."

Wanting to move into coaching

Parkinson's journey in basketball is a fascinating one because he didn’t start playing until his early 20s. To now think that he's reached 300 games in the league despite the late start, and spending three years with now wife Tia in Melbourne, and it's a great credit to him.

But he's also found himself become more and more of a great student of the game over the past 15 years. That's why his passion to be involved on the coaching side has continued to grow.

"Probably over the last five or six years I've been thinking about the coaching side a bit more and I'm not sure if I'll dive head first straight into serious WABL coaching and wanting to progress being an assistant and head coaching ranks if an NBL1 opportunity was there," Parkinson said.

"That's the sort of thing that's probably a little bit further away and Tia and I are going to be having a baby in August so that's going to take up a big part of our lives now for a fair while so that will take priority.

"Coaching is something that I've been thinking about and as you get older as a basketball player, you start to think less like a player and more like a coach and your body starts to get a bit slower but your mind a bit sharper.

"I really love the strategy element and execution side of the game so as that's grown for me I've become more interested."

Lifelong bond from basketball

Basketball will forever be part of Parkinson's life for so many reasons and beyond just those experiences on court that he'll cherish or now involved as a coach, but for the lifelong bonds it's created.

Not only are most of his and Tia's close connections all through basketball, but that's in fact how they met one another. It's something that remains a huge part of their life with Parkinson still involved at Lakeside and his wife the CEO at Cockburn after her own successful 184-game career.

"It's really cool that basketball brought us together and her job now is awesome," Parkinson said.

"She comes home from work and she's telling me about her work day and she's literally talking about NBL1 and signing players, speaking to agents and all that sort of stuff that sounds so awesome to me.

"I think she has the best work stories and it is pretty cool that we met through basketball, a lot of our connections and relationships have come through basketball, and most of our community around us are all through basketball.

"Our wedding celebrant was Kaija Leo who has been around Lakeside for 30 years and Andy (Stewart) and an old teammate Tareq (El-Batanouny) were MC's at our wedding, and our whole bridal party was mostly from basketball.

"It's such a massive fabric of our lives and I'm so grateful that I got to meet Tia through it as well."

Excitement at being a dad

Not only is the start of this season a big one for Parkinson with the 300-game milestone and the retirement from playing, but he's about to become a dad to a daughter for the first time and he can’t wait.

"I'm super excited about it and we're really looking forward to it," he said.

"We know that we're having a girl who is due early August which will be really exciting and complete life changing. But that will be in the best way ever so we can't wait."

Lightning prospects in 2026

He might not be out on the court now after Saturday night with this Lakeside team of 2026, but Parkinson is going to remain heavily involved and he is excited by their prospects.

They might have missed finals the past couple of seasons, but he does like what they've been building. He feels key to their success in 2026 will be keeping the majority of their group together including bringing back import guard Isaiah Lewis who produced 20.3 points and 4.0 assists in 2025.

Beyond that, it's how deep the Lightning go that has him most confident of a good season ahead. He hopes that they can get on the board on Saturday night against the Wolves in his 300th and final game.

"I am really excited about the top seven or eight players that we have, but also the depth and it has been a strength of ours we've been trying to build over the last few years," Parkinson said.

"We've had some really good starting level players but we've also had great depth in the likes of guys like Mike Garbellini, Ben Lee, the Grida boys and I'm not naming everybody.

"But we've got that strength of depth and you see that in the D League team that we put out as well so the future's bright. We've got a really good NBL1 squad this year as well with Isaiah coming back and our new import Mike who gets in shortly is going to be great for us.

"Then we've got the rest of our boys like JD (Josh Davey), (Corey) Shervill, Liam Patterson who came back from college last year, and I could go on and on.

"That's a big strength of ours in terms of the consistency and depth that we have year to year, and we don't have too much turnover even though we've lost Rowan (Mackenzie) which is a huge blow and he's a great guy, and we're still great mates."