When I was 24 years old I decided I’d like to be a professional athlete. Four years later, I’ve tried out for half a dozen local representative basketball teams, tried to play for four recreational basketball teams governed by Basketball NSW, tried out fourteen combat sports institutions, attended an athletics training session that had no adults participating, contacted another athletics club’s president to ask about how I can join with no response, attempted two ultramarathons, one of which I got lost on due to negligently poor signage and another I finished in the middle of the pack as there was no warning that the track was almost entirely single file, so being the gentleman I am I let every runner go past me and had to spend half the race trying to overtake everyone and tried out two gridiron teams that were prohibitively dysfunctional. I’ve also tried to be a professional basketball and gridiron scout, spending three years uploading videos of underrated athletes, accumulating over 100,000 YouTube channel views, yet after hundreds of interactions with individuals who might have been able to shine a light on my work or even facilitate giving me a job in the field, I have had almost zero interest in my scouting abilities. The lesson here is that there are gatekeepers in sporting organisations that do not want to give an unknown quantity an opportunity, which hampers the potential growth of their sports, as it appears that gaining a job in sport involves knowing certain powerbrokers, rather than just being talented. The result is that we often don’t see the most talented individuals perform at the highest levels of their sports, which hampers the quality of the sport’s product. It also reduces the amount of people who can participate in the sport at any level, which can lead to poor health in our community.
Trying out for representative basketball teams often means you’re trying to supercede placeholders who played for the team the year prior. As a result, coaches in charge of selecting the teams might struggle to pick a previously unknown player instead of someone they’ve established a relationship with. They might be so apathetic in their evaluation process that they won’t even give players an indentifiable number, meaning that they’d have to speak to a player in person if they wanted to pick them. This inhibits a meritocratic process, leading to inferior team performance. Despite being objectively talented at basketball – I can reliably make mid range jump shots with both hands, dribble and shoot well, run fast and play strong defense – I survived only one cut from the half dozen representative teams I tried out for, and failed the second one. Throughout that time I was abused by coaches and other players with no organizational oversight. I even shirtfronted a guy because he pegged a ball at my head after I told him to stop nagging me to pass him the ball the way he wanted. The coach sided with that player as he was mates with him. The youth coach for that club wandered over and lended his support to my potential coach, saying that he encouraged his players to attempt to inflict violence where necessary. As far as I could see, there is no governing body over the standard of the coaching in sport on a regular basis.
Trying to play local basketball in the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria is very difficult. To even play one game you have to pay around $150 to Basketball NSW, then around $150 to the local club to be eligible to play in one half year season. There seems to be no trial option. Rather than insert you into a team, they ask you to contact the teams already established in the competition – you just have to hope that those teams want to welcome you. I was prepared to move to Melbourne and try to rise through the ranks to potentially play bro basketball for the NBL, but Victorian clubs have the same gatekeeper-enabling process. The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported that wait times for youth basketballers to be placed into a local team can be up to three years. I wouldn’t be surprised if the clubs do very little to encourage players to participate in the sport based on my experiences.
If you want to coach basketball in NSW, you have to pay around $150 to undertake a six or so hour coaching course. I did so, but left within two hours, as the coaching instructor was teaching abusive practices. This included making the lower skilled players stand in place of cones for the better players to dribble around them, as well as having players compete with 100% intensity in one-on-one scrimmages immediately before their games, which would most likely increase injury risk dramatically.
I loved watching the UFC and think practicing fighting is a great way to keep fit and exorcise emotional demons. Of the 14 combat sports institutions I tried out over the past four years, I only attended two on more than five occasions. This was generally because the coaches did not show any interest in providing a pathway to me becoming a professional fighter. They would often criticize me for perceived errors in front of other trainees in a humiliating fashion; they’d allow sparring with minimal protection; they would refuse to corner me as they wanted to protect their coaching record; they’d refuse to progress me to higher levels of training despite my protests. I even ventured down to Wollongong to train at UFC featherweight champion Alex Volkanovski’s gym – no one welcomed me to the gym by showing me how to sign up or where to get changed into my uniform. When the training session started the fighters went off to another section under Volkanovski’s head coach Joe Lopez while everyone else did jiu jitsu training under the guidance of a trainee. When I found myself asking a peer how to do a move while the coach – who had to look after at least 15 students simultaneously, a pretty typical infringement on the part of martial arts clubs as far as a lack of staffing – was not within earshot, I realized that Volkanovksi’s gym was just as negligent as the ten or so I’d already tried out closer to home. As a I tried to leave early, a staff member asked me why I was leaving. I said that I wasn’t impressed with the quality of coaching. The staff member went to fetch Joe Lopez. When I repeated my feedback, he profanely told me to leave, hurling abuse and asking what I knew if I was just a white belt. The lesson here is that there is very little standard for the quality of coaching in martial arts in my experience, which leads to students inevitably being mistreated, hampering the growth of the sport. A symptom of this is that the UFC Gym in Penrith recently shut down.
Just as in my martial arts training experience, an unfortunate reality of grassroots sport is that parents don’t actively participate in their children’s activities. I went to a karate class in Penrith and I was the only adult training, while around ten parents sat and watched. This happened to a greater extent at my local athletics club. I was the only adult participating in the opening event, the 1500 metre run. There must have been atleast 40 parents watching their children run. Having completed the race, I saw that there was no cultivation of adult athletics at that club. This is echoed in Blacktown’s athletics club, which seemingly only caters to people under the age of 17.
Terrigal Trotters produces events such as a 100 mile race, which inevitably takes place at night, as the fastest ever finisher started the race at 6am and finished it at 1:27pm the following day. I was placed in the top 15 of that race at the 25km point, having passed atleast three points on the track that took guesswork to figure out which way to go. Into my 26th kilometre, I decided to go over a bridge rather than run ahead – no signage was available. I ended up making a loop to the back of the multi-hundred strong pack of runners of various distance attempts, as though I’d fallen off of Rainbow Road in Mario Kart. An older lady ran past me and asked me if I was in the bushes doing number twos. Having realized that I had little chance of winning the race at that point and understanding that the race organisers did not care to mark the track properly, I ran another 25km to a checkpoint where my dad picked me up. The evening was scheduled for heavy rain, which did occur – I did not fancy running around a poorly marked track at 3am guided by a headlamp after having run for almost ten hours, slipping and sliding around. I paid $300 for this experience.
I would say that best practice when coaching is getting as many people involved as possible. At Nepean Ducks gridiron club, a team captain thought it’d be best if a line of fifteen or so players waited to be passed the ball from about three metres way. When I protested at the inefficiency by recommending that we split into three different groups – after all, there were enough balls around – the response I received was that “not everyone can throw a ball”. A few compatriots and I proved otherwise, starting our own line. This experience dissatisfied me, so I tried out another gridiron club 45 kilometres from home. The coaches there were similarly authoritative in their instruction, recommending certain techniques that I felt to be incorrect given my thousands of hours of evaluating professional gridiron players. After about 80% of the training session involving one or two player drills while everyone else waited for their turn, we eventually got to play some game-realistic repetitions. Having had to be combative with so many individuals in gridiron and my other sporting experiences, I could see that this club was not worth being a part of. For some reason they disallowed white mouthguards, unlike Boxing NSW – I got my only boxing fight having been given an opportunity at Jabout Penrith, which almost saw my mouthguard go flying – but atleast they gave me an opportunity to compete.
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