Having played basketball since a very young age, the sport has always been a part of my life.

One of the earliest family videos of me is attempting to dribble the ball as a 3 year old! From playing in our driveway, games during primary school lunch breaks, playing in youth leagues, pick up games and for school, basketball was a constant until I was severely injured prior to playing at university. Five surgical operations later, it was clear that participating as a player was never going to be a part of my future again. Devastated, but determined to find a way to stay a part of the sport, I qualified as a Student Athletic Trainer at university and joined the women’s basketball team on the bench providing first aid, supervising physiotherapy programmes, taping and supporting previously injured players returning to play, overseeing team conditioning, nutrition and hydration. It was an amazing experience and exposed me to extremely high level coaching – not just in basketball but in other sports that I supported when the basketball season was over. This was pivotal: I decided that what I wanted to do above all was to coach and to use that opportunity to impact positively on the lives of my players.

It has been an interesting journey and I’m still learning, being extremely fortunate to be part of the premier American Point Guard College’s Key5 Coaching Community of high-level coaches who are committed to be transformational coaches.  It was out of that commitment to being a transformational coach that Attack Basketball Academy was born.

I had previously coached at a number of clubs, never satisfied with the missed opportunities or emphasis on transactional coaching: I wanted to coach at a club that valued the whole player experience, that deliberately built a culture that enabled excellence and recognised that culture drives success at all levels – from fundamental basketball skills to executing a demanding offense or pressure defense to celebrating the efforts of others to picking a teammate up off the floor.

We cannot have success on court without teams that value each other and are committed to each other.  We cannot have success without Championship Habits. We cannot have success without a positive environment for mental health. We cannot have success if we are not committed to growth. And we cannot have success if we are transactional coaches viewing our players as commodities to achieve a winning season, using the skills of our players of all ages to fuel our own ego as coaches.

What transactional coaches fail to realise, is that the strongest, most successful teams are those with the strongest cultures that bind them together and raise the team collectively: a winning programme at the youth, collegiate or the professional level is not achieved by recruiting and giving the most minutes to the players with the most advanced skills.

Skill alone and the coach’s basketball knowledge will not achieve long term, consistent winning seasons year after year.  Success is predicated on so much more than the scoreboard. At Attack, we have the basketball knowledge and are dedicated to developing skilled players, but our success is determined by the individual journeys taken by young people and their collective journey as a team to becoming better people, using basketball as our medium.

My objective is to impact positively on young lives through competitive sport, high standards and expectations.  I am committed to serving my players, continuing to improve my skills as a coach, having a growth mind-set and to providing a wealth of positive experiences and opportunities for the Attack community.