In the lead up to the competition, masters squad captain and organiser Wayne Bradley contacted a variety of players that he had previously competed with or against in the Queanbeyan and ACT competitions.

"We played a lot of division one out there in Canberra and I just wanted to get a group interested, some of the guys were so happy to get together and come out of retirement," he said.

"It's really just a group of friends."

The Pan Pacific Masters Games is arguably the largest event of its kind, attracting more than 13000 participants across 40 different sports from around Australia and neighbouring nations. Bradley considered this and began organising real game-time experience for the out of practice squad.

"When I first got all of those guys together, they were all a bit rusty and some of us hadn't played for more than ten years so I said to the guys, 'Why don't we organise a couple of hit-outs against some older teams?'," Bradley said.

He contacted Mike Weekes from Goulburn Basketball, and the pair worked on organising a series of trial matches to be played between the two neighbouring locales. The first was played in Goulburn on Saturday, January 23, and was won by the home side.

"They weren't as old as I was expecting, there were a lot of 30-year-olds and our youngest bloke was 43!" Bradley said.

"We didn't go down by too much, they only beat us by 21 points and we just ran out of steam, the younger blokes just run us ragged in the second half."

Goulburn will be making their way to Queanbeyan at some stage over the next few months for the second game, while Bradley has already begun organising for further exhibition games to be played against a Wagga Wagga based masters squad.