The Road East

It is Monday, 24 August 2026. I am in Melbourne with my family, and tomorrow morning I will board a flight back to Perth for one reason: to leave.

When I booked the flights on 8 August, the trip had a completely different purpose. I was planning ahead for September. My U16 Maroondah Magic Basketball team, which includes Jordan, was due to play a semi-final on 12 September, and I had booked the flights so I could get back to Melbourne and coach them. That was the plan.

Instead, on 19 August, my employment as Chief Executive Officer of Perry Lakes Hawks Basketball Association ended during probation completely unannounced.

After my employment ended on 19 August, that plan no longer made sense. I paid another $350 to change the booking, bringing the Melbourne leg forward so I could get home and be with my family after everything that had happened. I also changed the return leg to Perth for 25 August, but this time I would not be flying back west to continue the job. I would be flying back to collect my car and belongings, return the apartment keys, fuel up and start the long drive home to Melbourne. On 8 August, those flights represented a future in Perth and a trip home to coach my son. By 24 August, they had become part of the logistics of leaving Perth altogether.

The apartment at Adelaide Terrace, East Perth was approved for a twelve-month lease beginning on 6 July. The rent is $635 a week. I paid the bond, signed the lease, organised furniture, dealt with shower repairs and maintenance, and started treating the place like somewhere I would actually live long term.

Tomorrow, instead of preparing for the six-week inspection that had already been scheduled, I will be handing back the keys.

I will load the last few things into the car, return the keys, fill the tank and point the car east.

Perth to Melbourne.

More than three thousand kilometres.

Less than three months earlier I had made the journey in the opposite direction believing I was beginning one of the most important chapters of my professional life.

The Perry Lakes role had not been a casual experiment. I had left my family in Victoria temporarily, relocated across the country, accepted a two-year fixed-term CEO appointment and built my life around the belief that I had finally returned to where I belonged professionally.

And for a while, that belief felt completely justified.

On 1 July, I had written to Gregory Buck, the psychologist who helped me recover after the workplace injury that had changed my life two years earlier.

I thanked him for helping me process what had happened, develop healthier coping strategies and regain my confidence. I told him I was now the CEO of a basketball association in Perth. I told him that after a month in the chair I had greater clarity, resilience and focus than at any other point in my adult life.

Then I wrote something that, sitting here on 24 August, is almost surreal to read.

I said I was in the best headspace I had ever been in.

I meant it.

That email was not an attempt to convince myself I was okay. It was not a carefully constructed message for a lawyer, an insurer or a future employment dispute. It was a private thank-you to a psychologist who had seen me when I was anything but okay.

I was working again. Leading again. Making decisions. Thinking strategically. Building programs. Reviewing financial systems. Meeting stakeholders. Talking to schools, sponsors, Basketball WA and people who could help the Association grow.

I was doing the work I had spent nearly two years trying to get back to.

Then, seventy-two days after I started, it ended.

I was not angry.

I was not hurt.

I was not embarrassed.

Those emotions would have made for an easy version of the story, but they would not have been mine.

What I felt most strongly was certainty about why I had made the decisions I had made.

I had been appointed CEO. To me, that meant accepting responsibility for the organisation I had been entrusted to lead. It meant caring about ethics, governance, financial controls, staff structures, data security and whether decisions were actually in the best interests of the Association.

If something did not look right, I asked about it.

If a process was weak, I wanted to strengthen it.

If an arrangement needed to be examined, I examined it.

If the Board needed better information to govern properly, I wanted to provide it.

That did not mean I handled every conversation perfectly. No leader does. It did not mean every idea I had was automatically right. It did not mean everyone had to agree with me.

But there was a difference between reflecting on how I might have communicated something and regretting why I raised it.

I did not regret the principles.

The difficult part was understanding how an appointment that began with so much promise had ended so quickly.

The answer was not contained in a single meeting on 19 August.

It was not contained in a termination letter.

And it certainly was not contained in a neat explanation about whether I was the right fit.

To understand why tomorrow I will board a flight west simply so I can turn around and drive east, I have to understand the road that brought me there.

That means going back to basketball, to Bulleen, to WorkCover, to the long period when I did not know whether I would work in the sport again, and to the series of applications and interviews that eventually put a CEO contract in front of me.

Because the drive east that begins tomorrow is not the beginning of the story.

It is the second time I have been forced to ask a much bigger question.

If work had become such a large part of who I was, who was I when work disappeared?