Beaton Park Stadium
basketball centre in Gwynneville, New South Wales
Beaton Park Stadium, also known as Snakepit Stadium, is an Australian basketball stadium in Gwynneville, New South Wales. It was the home of National Basketball League side Illawarra Hawks between 1979 and 1998, and is the home of Basketball Illawarra.
History
After the stadium's construction in 1965, a game between Illawarra and the Sydney Paratels opened the stadium.
In 1979 the stadium was used as the Illawarra Hawks home stadium during the inaugural season of the National Basketball League. The Hawks remained at the venue until the opening of the 6,000 seat Wollongong Entertainment Centre in 1998, though they continue to train at the stadium and use it for pre-season games.
The stadium has hosted multiple Australia Boomers and Opals exhibition games, as well as the Harlem Globetrotters, the United States women's national basketball team and multiple NCAA college teams.
“Beaton Park Stadium” enters the record as basketball centre in Gwynneville, New South Wales. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Beaton, Park and Stadium can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24185237. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1998 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “Beaton Park Stadium” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.