Gold Coast

Gold Coast Basketball taught me something else about returning to work.

Sometimes honesty comes with a price, even when you cannot prove what that price was.

I progressed well through their recruitment process for the General Manager position. The first conversation was described as an initial screening interview, an opportunity for both sides to assess fit.

I came away from it excited, followed up afterwards and was invited to a second interview.

After that interview, Gold Coast President Rebecca Morris contacted me and asked for professional references. Ideally, they wanted a Board member and another person in authority from my most recent organisation.

And there it was.

Bulleen.

I could have danced around what had happened. I could have supplied referees from elsewhere in basketball and hoped nobody asked too many questions. I did not.

After everything I had been through, I was not going to rebuild my career by pretending the injury had never happened.

I explained that I had suffered a workplace injury arising from an occupational health and safety matter at my most recent employer and that, because of those circumstances, I could not provide the type of referee they were requesting from Bulleen.

I gave them the details of my vocational adviser, Kate Southall, who could speak to my recovery and readiness to return to work. I provided alternative senior basketball referees and supplied Bulleen financial material because whatever had happened at the end of my employment, the work I had done there still existed.

I later provided Mason Rogers, Bulleen’s former Big V Women’s Head Coach, as another referee who had worked extensively with me and could speak directly about what I had done inside the organisation.

Six days later Gold Coast advised that it would re-advertise the position and would not progress my application.

I was disappointed enough to write back asking for personal feedback because I genuinely believed the role and my experience had been a strong fit.

I cannot say that disclosing my workplace injury cost me the Gold Coast job. They never said that, and it would be wrong to present an assumption as fact.

But I know the sequence.

Before the disclosure, I had moved from the first interview to the second interview and then to the reference stage.

Then I told them everything.

Then my candidacy ended.

Maybe those things were connected. Maybe they were not.

What mattered more was the decision I had made.

I had chosen honesty.

For someone trying desperately to get his career back, that was not necessarily the easiest choice.

But if I wanted transparency, accountability and uncomfortable truths from the people I might one day lead, I had to be prepared to live by those standards myself.

Gold Coast became another rejection, but not another defeat. In a strange way, it became evidence that the person emerging from the previous two years was beginning to know exactly what he stood for.