Chloe & Co deliver as coach chases Asia Cup

• Warwick Senators beat Cockburn Cougars 102-76 with head coach Brad Robbins in India
• Captain Chloe Forster won Grand Final MVP with 34 points and 14-from-14 free throws
• Rockingham Flames beat Geraldton 66-62 despite shooting 3-from-22 from three-point range

Warwick Senators head coach Brad Robbins won an NBL1 West championship on Saturday without being in the country, watching from Ahmedabad where he is on duty with the Australian Emus, as captain Chloe Forster scored 34 points in a 102-76 dismantling of the Cockburn Cougars at RAC Arena.

NBL championship winner Paul Rogers ran the team in his absence.

What Warwick produced was not the performance of a side missing anybody. Cockburn had lost three games all season. They arrived on a 12-game winning run, in a fourth consecutive Grand Final, as reigning champions who had beaten these same Senators in a qualifying final a fortnight earlier.

Forster, fresh from a WNBL championship with the Townsville Fire, went 8-from-12 from the field, 4-from-6 from beyond the arc and 14-from-14 at the free-throw line, adding six assists, five rebounds and three steals. Fifteen of her points came in the third quarter alone, and she was named Grand Final MVP.

Cockburn could not keep her out of the paint, and by the time they worked out they could not, the game was gone.

The shooting numbers tell the rest of it. Warwick made 56.9 per cent of their field goals and 56 per cent of their three-pointers. Cockburn managed 42 and 21.4. Warwick also had 28 assists to Cockburn's 17.

Mackenzie Clinch Hoycard added 22 points on 6-from-10 from three, one of them on the quarter-time buzzer, and Jayda Clark had 11 points, seven rebounds and nine assists. Warwick led at every break, 26-25, 54-44 and 80-59.

Darcee Garbin, back playing as a new mother and chasing a fourth championship, scored 12 in the first quarter and finished with 18. Jessie Edwards also had 18 and Cierra Walker 17.

It was a farewell for Natalie Burton. The Western Australian won her fifth championship and her second with the Senators, after three at the Perry Lakes Hawks, in her 268th game in the league, on top of a career that took in college, the WNBL, Europe and the Opals.

Warwick had also been the team that ended Cockburn's 30-game winning streak earlier in the season, so the warning signs were already there.

ROCKINGHAM WON THE MEN'S TITLE WITHOUT SHOOTING

Three hours later, on the same floor, the Rockingham Flames outlasted the Geraldton Buccaneers 66-62 in a Grand Final that was decided in traffic.

Rockingham won it making three three-pointers from 22 attempts and three free throws from nine. Fifty-four of their sixty-six points came from inside the arc, where they went 27-from-51, and they missed all fifteen of their first-half attempts from distance and still led at the break.

Geraldton shot better from the line, 13-from-14 against 3-from-9. They out-rebounded Rockingham 48-47. They blocked eight shots to three. They lost.

Isaac White was named Grand Final MVP after playing all 40 minutes with Verle Williams attached to him for every one of them, finishing with 19 points, seven rebounds, three assists and two steals on 8-from-12 shooting.

White had made his feelings plain before the game. He was the Adelaide 36ers team that lost Game 5 of the NBL26 Championship Series to the Sydney Kings, and he told NBL1 West that this one carried the same weight.

"I haven't won an NBL championship, and obviously I'd like to have both, but now that's in the past earlier this year, this is just as important to me as an NBL championship," White told NBL1.com.au.

"It doesn't matter the level, anytime you get an opportunity to finish a season with a championship it means a lot and on this stage especially, it definitely does heighten things a little bit."

The quarters were 13-10, 29-24 at half-time and 53-49 at the last change. Geraldton's best period was the third, when they scored 25 and cut a ten-point deficit, and it still was not enough.

Blake Jones effectively ended it, blocking Joshua Keyes in the final minute with Rockingham four in front. Jones finished with 14 points and 11 rebounds, Laquinton Ross had 14 and nine, and Emmett Naar eight points with eight assists.

There was a thread running through the night that only Rockingham would have felt. When the Flames lost the 2025 preliminary final on the road to Warwick, the game-winning three was hit by Cooper Creek. Creek now plays for Geraldton, and on Saturday he had 10 points and 10 rebounds in a Grand Final his new club lost.

Devondrick Walker top-scored for the Buccaneers with 16 points, nine assists and six rebounds. Captain Liam Hunt had 12 points, seven rebounds and four blocks, Keyes 12 and 12, and Matthew Norman seven. Hunt and Williams both played the full forty minutes.

For Rockingham this is a second men's championship and a first since 2022, when they also beat Geraldton in a Grand Final. Ryan Petrik is now a four-time championship coach at the club, two with the men and two with the women, after three near misses in the WNBL with the Perth Lynx.

White is not the Flames captain, Travis Durnin is, and two of Durnin's teammates took something particular out of the night. Ryan Godfrey, a former captain with 375 games behind him, became a two-time champion. Tevin Jackson won the first championship of a 194-game career.

Geraldton, who won in 2023 and 2025, were denied back-to-back titles for the first time in a fifth Grand Final in eight years.