Singapore’s Liam Blakney goes from basketball last pick to 3x3 star

SINGAPORE – An active, curious child, Liam Blakney learnt swimming when he was three, picked up ice hockey at five before trying out basketball when he was 12.

In Secondary 1, the teenager enrolled in Gan Eng Seng Secondary School’s basketball trials because the school did not offer swimming as a co-curricular activity.

He barely made the cut as one of the last picks, even after they took in extra players for a 14-member squad that year.

That seemingly fortuitous selection would set him on the path to 3x3 basketball success. Just seven years later, he sank the winning basket in the Singapore men’s team’s epic 21-20 win over powerhouses Philippines in the 2025 SEA Games semi-finals en route to a historic silver.

Ahead of the March 28-29 3x3.EXE Super Premier Singapore stop at the Sengkang Grand Mall, the 20-year-old told The Sunday Times: “Since I was a little kid, sports have been a big part of our lives because my dad really loves sports and mum is also pretty active and stays in shape.

“I was pretty lucky how basketball worked out for me.

“I like the friends and connections I made through basketball, because it is a team sport compared to swimming.

“I also like how basketball works, where a player can be multi-dimensional.

“My strengths are my defence and my hustle. There are players who are way more talented than me, but I focus on being a stable player, put in a lot of effort, and it really pays off.”

Born in Singapore to a Canadian father and a Singaporean-Malay mother, Blakney was influenced by his parents’ active lifestyles. He got into ice hockey when they lived in Canada for three years.

After completing secondary school, he joined Kaixuan Basketball Club, which he said “really propelled me and actually got me seen in Singapore basketball”.

The club sent him to Basketball Association of Singapore trials and he made the national Under-18 team. The Covid-19 pandemic forced him to pick up 3x3 basketball, which led to his Singapore team selection after Lazar Rasic became national coach in 2023.

Still, Blakney remained an active ice hockey player and was even the national goalkeeper from 2022 to 2024, which was a “crazy time” as he went to school at Ngee Ann Polytechnic at 9am, basketball training in the evening, ice hockey training at midnight before sleeping at 3am.

He said: “I really love both sports even though it’s a lot to juggle. I had to be really focused and disciplined, but I enjoyed that kind of lifestyle where I’m constantly putting in a lot of work and getting tested.”

With the national ice hockey’s training ground moving to Johor Bahru after JCube closed in 2023, and the national 3x3 programme becoming more structured, he chose to focus on basketball, which paid off with the SEA Games silver.

But the 1.86m player, who is set to enlist for national service in April, feels there is more to come from the national team, who have ambitious plans to win SEA Games gold on home soil in 2029 and qualify for the 2032 Olympics.

He said: “For the past 2½ years, we have been training really hard. We were due to show we can achieve something because we’ve had a lot of tournaments where we’ve let ourselves down.

“At the SEA Games, we showed up with our proper capability and potential, and we really deserved that medal.

“It was a surreal feeling beating that Philippines team, but afterwards I was only happy for 10 minutes because there’s more in us, and it’s not the end, it’s really just the start.

“We’ve played a lot of tournaments, bigger ones like the Asia Cup, and we want to show that we can compete worldwide and not just in the South-east Asian region.”

The national senior and Under-23 men’s teams will have a chance to show their progress at the 3x3.EXE Super Premier competition, which concludes in Singapore after earlier rounds in Japan and Thailand.

Touted as the world’s largest professional 3x3 basketball league system, the Super Premier tournament features a 12-team field of play-off qualifiers and invited guest teams.

The competition is being held ahead of other 3x3 basketball events in Singapore, such as the Fiba 3x3 Asia Cup (April 1 to 5) and the Fiba 3x3 World Cup Qualifier (April 11 and 12) at The Kallang’s OCBC Square.

High Performance Sport Institute deputy chief Low Jia Ren said these are exciting opportunities for the national players “to elevate their game against the top regional teams and gain valuable competition experience in front of our home crowd cheering them on”.