What Remains

The easiest ending would be to say everything happens for a reason.

I do not believe that.

Sometimes things happen because people make decisions.

Sometimes organisations get things right.

Sometimes they do not.

Sometimes two parties can look at the same events and genuinely reach different conclusions.

Sometimes timing is terrible.

Sometimes you choose one opportunity over another and spend years wondering what would have happened if you had gone the other way.

That was true of Rockhampton.

I had declined their offer because Perry Lakes appeared to be the stronger opportunity for me at that moment.

Only weeks later I contacted them again after realising the Perth environment was different from what I had expected.

They had appointed someone else.

Timing is everything, Rebecca told me.

She was right.

But regret is only useful if it teaches you something.

I learned that a title cannot be the measure of recovery.

I learned that becoming CEO did not prove I was healed and losing the CEO job did not prove I had failed.

I learned that work can matter enormously without being allowed to define everything.

I learned that family is not the thing waiting at home while your career happens somewhere else.

Family is the thing that remains when the career changes direction overnight.

I learned that governance sounds abstract until you are the person required to act on it.

I learned that ethical leadership is rarely cinematic.

Most of the time it is asking boring questions people would rather not answer.

Why has this account not been reconciled?

Who owns this information?

Where is the approval?

Is this arrangement good value?

What does the policy say?

Who is accountable?

What is in the best interests of the organisation?

Those questions can make you popular when everyone agrees there is a problem.

They can make you much less popular when the answer requires somebody to change.

I also learned something about resilience.

For years I thought resilience meant being able to absorb more.

Work harder.

Push through.

Take the hit.

Keep going.

I think differently now.

Resilience is not endless tolerance.

Sometimes resilience is knowing what you stand for before the pressure arrives.

Sometimes it is accepting consequences without surrendering the principle.

Sometimes it is admitting you could have handled a conversation better without allowing that admission to erase the issue you were trying to address.

Sometimes resilience is knowing that tomorrow I will get into my car in Perth and drive home.

Not because you have been defeated.

Because the direction has changed.

I do not know yet what the road east will feel like once Perth disappears behind me.

I do know it will not return me to the person I was before Bulleen.

That person no longer exists.

It will not return me to the person who arrived in Perth in June either.

He has changed too.

What will come home is somebody who has been forced twice to separate professional identity from personal worth.

Somebody who still loves basketball.

Somebody who still believes in leadership.

Somebody who still believes organisations should be run properly.

Somebody who knows much more clearly what he is prepared to compromise on and what he is not.

The future is uncertain again.

But uncertainty is no longer the same thing as fear.

I have rebuilt once.

I can build again.

And tomorrow, when I turn the car east, I will know something I did not understand before: starting again does not mean starting from zero.

Basketball is not over for me.

If anything, I am more certain about that now than I was before I went to Perth.

For most of my life basketball has been the game I love. I have played it, coached it, watched it, talked about it endlessly and watched Jordan grow through it.

But somewhere through Bulleen and Perry Lakes I discovered something else.

I do not just love the game. I love the business of the game.

I love strategy. Commercial growth. Governance. People. Culture. High performance. Participation. Facilities. Budgets. Partnerships. Structure.

I love taking something complicated and finding a way to make it clearer. I love looking at what exists today and imagining what it could become tomorrow.

Perry Lakes did not extinguish that appetite. It confirmed it.

There were nights in Perth when I would leave the office, go home, cook dinner for one, sit in front of the television for a while and then reach for the laptop again. Nobody was asking me to. Ideas just kept coming.

How could we improve this? How could we structure that? How could we grow participation? Improve the referee pathway? Modernise competitions? Support staff better? Create stronger commercial partnerships?

That is still where my mind goes.

Maybe the next opportunity will be another basketball association. Maybe another sport. Maybe a league, governing body, club or organisation I have not even thought about yet.

I do not know.

And strangely, I am excited by that.

Because uncertainty does not frighten me the way it once did.

Tomorrow I will board a plane west. A day later, I will start driving east. Somewhere across those thousands of kilometres, one chapter will close.

But basketball?

We are not finished yet.

In basketball, when one possession ends, you do not stand there staring at where the ball went.

You get back. You reset.

And when the ball comes your way again, you make the next possession count.

I am ready for the next possession.