The Night I Told Them Everything

On 23 July, less than seven weeks into the job, we had another Board meeting scheduled for that night.

At 1:35 that morning I sent a message into the Hawks Board/CEO WhatsApp group.

I asked for ten minutes at the beginning of the meeting. I wanted to explain why things had become heated at the end of the previous Board meeting and, more importantly, I wanted to own the part of that which belonged to me.

I had already called Kylie to apologise for the way I had handled part of that earlier exchange. In the message to the Board I said that if I had my time again, I would not have gone about things the way I did. I acknowledged that I had put people in an awkward position.

That matters to me because this story cannot simply be about everything I believed other people got wrong. Leadership also means being prepared to look at yourself.

But I wanted them to understand where the intensity was coming from.

In the days immediately before that meeting, I felt there had finally been a shift inside the office. Not universal acceptance, but an acknowledgement that things had to change. I believed the Board was approaching a point where it would have to decide whether it was prepared to support that change and bring the organisation with it.

I had also spent around ninety minutes speaking with Rick Morcom, an eighty-year-old man who had invested more than three decades of his life into Perry Lakes Basketball. I came away from that conversation believing the problems I was trying to address stretched back far beyond my arrival, and that there were people within the membership desperate to see the Association reconnect with what had once made it so strong.

My message to the Board that morning finished with something that captured exactly why I had taken the job.

Take the basketball element and my deep love for the game away, I told them, and what I was really about was bringing people together from different walks of life so they could share collective enjoyment and success in whatever part of the game they chose to pursue.

I told them I could not wait for the days ahead because I believed we had an opportunity to transform the Association and bring together a community that, in my view, simply wanted someone to care and involve them.

I genuinely meant every word.

The request for ten minutes at the start of the meeting was never acknowledged.

And when the meeting began, it did not happen.

So later in the night, when an opportunity appeared, I took the floor. It was not planned into the agenda and it did not arrive neatly at the beginning as I had requested. I simply reached a point where I knew I needed to say it.

I told them about Bulleen.

It was not the first time Perry Lakes had heard that Bulleen had been turbulent. During recruitment I had already been open with Kylie, Morgan, Rocky and Ella about the Board changes, the divided views around reform and the difficult environment created by trying to turn around an Association that had come off a substantial financial loss. What I had never given them was the human version of that story. That night, I did.

Almost all of it.

I told them about what had happened in that workplace, what followed, what it had done to me and what it had taken to find my way back. I stopped short of telling them that I had been on WorkCover, but otherwise I stripped away most of the professional armour I had been wearing since I arrived in Perth.

I was raw.

I cried.

I showed them the part of me that did not exist on a résumé, in a KPI document or in a Board paper.

And I told the five people in that room something I felt deeply.

I owed them everything for giving me the opportunity I had spent so long trying to earn.

After Bulleen, after treatment, after the applications, after the rejections and after rebuilding myself physically and mentally, these were the people who had trusted me with another basketball organisation.

I told them I would not let them down.

A couple of Board members applauded the honesty and bravery it had taken to share it. Others left the meeting without much visible reaction. At the time I did not read too much into that. People process vulnerability differently. Looking back now, the contrast stays with me.

Because twenty-seven days later, the same story had a completely different ending.

On Tuesday 18 August, at around 8pm, an email arrived requiring me to attend a meeting at 9:30 the following morning.

The meeting was conducted by interim Chair Blake Whitby and Justin Ford. Justin was the same Board member I had leaned on only five days into my appointment when I was trying to make sense of what I had walked into, and the person with whom I had instigated that early dinner conversation because I wanted the appointment to work.

The next morning my employment ended.

There was no symmetry to it.

On 23 July I had sat in that room crying, thanking those people for trusting me and telling them I would not let them down. Less than four weeks later I walked out of the stadium in circumstances that could hardly have felt colder, knowing I would never return as its CEO.

That is one of the hardest contrasts in the entire Perry Lakes story.

Not because vulnerability should guarantee employment. It should not. A Board still has to make decisions it believes are in the best interests of its organisation.

But because that night demonstrated how invested I was. I was not detached. I was not quietly planning an exit. I was not treating Perry Lakes as another line on my résumé.

I had shown them exactly who I was, where I had come from and how much the opportunity meant to me.

And I had done it believing the relationship between a Board and its CEO was strong enough to hold an uncomfortable truth.

Twenty-seven days later, I learned how quickly that belief could disappear.