My coaching jobs in this country have taken me to England's three biggest cities but I have never worked in a place more geared up for basketball than Brighton and Hove.

I think we proved that again last Saturday, both on and off the court, when we beat Sheffield Sharks. Many of you will have witnessed the way we ended Sheffield's unbeaten run, still without being at our best offensively.

Even when we were up by eight or 12 I thought we wouldn't get away from Sheffield but we did, which surprised me. To be honest, we could have won by 25 but I'm not really into rattling up big margins. I'm into winning games.

One of the things I probably do poorly is getting the bench guys in there. I tried to put that right on Saturday and they responded. They needed game time and it was a great team effort. I thought our added depth this year would be a huge factor with our schedule and it was proved on Saturday. We handled our foul trouble very well.

That win sends a message to the rest of the league, not that I care too much about that. We know we are pretty good anyway. It's a complete reversal from last year. Instead of sneaking up on people, people are going to be gunning for us. It still doesn't mean much until we put something in our trophy cabinet though.

A word of warning. We won't see Sheffield play like that again. Their confidence was shot playing at the Brighton Centre. That is three times in a row they have lost there. It's their bogey arena, which is good for us.

If I was delighted as a coach, it was also a good evening for me as club owner and general manager, thanks to the great crowd we had in the place. It completed a pretty hard working week.

Tremendous credit goes to our off-court staff for promoting the event and getting people in the place. Without all that it would not have been anywhere near as electric.

My previous coaching jobs have taken me to London, Manchester and Birmingham but I have never worked in a city like this. I won silverware in all those places but they were tough cities to crack, mainly because they were so big.

With Towers, we were completely lost in London. Manchester and Birmingham were not as bad but still tough. In Manchester, we were swallowed up by United and City. Birmingham was crazy. You must have about 18 professional football and rugby teams within 45 miles or so.

Brighton does not have so many sports teams and I like to think of us as one of the big three. It's not just that though. I also find Brighton to be very open-minded and more switched on to the game.

We are looking to build on that. Our latest venture is to link up with Henry J Bean's bar in West Street, Brighton. This is an American sports bar and it will be developing real basketball feel as the season progresses. They will be showing NBA action there and as much Bears footage as we can get hold of.

We have staged a couple of Bears' social evenings there and I know anywhere showing televised action will be popular with the growing army of hoops fans.

You cannot beat the live event though and hopefully many of you will be at Burgess Hill on Saturday for a tough game with Newcastle. We follow that by going to Leicester on Sunday and I know some of you are already making plans to follow us. We will be delighted to see and hear you. Let's keep this thing rolling.