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?

Basketball has never been something I just did.

It became the environment in which I understood myself best.

People outside community sport sometimes see only the visible product: children in uniforms, parents on plastic seats, referees with whistles, coaches pacing sidelines and senior teams playing under lights on a Saturday night.

Underneath that is an organisation.

Budgets. Payroll. Facilities. Insurance. Sponsors. Councils. Contracts. Volunteers. Staff. Coaches. Referees. Complaints. Policies. Governance. Data. Technology. Competition structures. High-performance programs. Thousands of participants and thousands more family members who expect the organisation to work even if they never see how it works.

I love the basketball part, but over time I became fascinated by everything underneath it.

Why did some associations grow while others stood still?

Why could one organisation build strong commercial partnerships while another relied almost entirely on participant fees?

Why were some Boards clear about governance while others drifted into operations?

Why did some staff structures create accountability while others created duplication?

Why were some organisations prepared to modernise while others protected systems simply because those systems had existed for years?

I like building things.

I like walking into a complicated environment, understanding how the pieces fitted together and then making it better.

That tendency became one of my strengths and, at different times, one of the reasons I create friction.

I have never been especially comfortable with the phrase, "That is how we have always done it."

My instinct is to ask whether that is a reason or an excuse.

Sport makes those questions harder because sport is emotional. Parents care about children. Coaches care about teams. Volunteers care about history. Boards care about reputation. High-performance people care about winning. Staff care about workload and security. Sponsors care about value. Members care about fees and opportunities.

Everyone has a legitimate interest.

Someone still has to make decisions.

I am comfortable doing that.

The longer I’ve worked in basketball administration, the more I understand that leadership in community sport is not a softer version of business leadership. In some ways it is harder.

A commercial customer can walk away from a company and buy somewhere else.

A basketball family might have twenty years of history with one club.

A volunteer might have given thousands of unpaid hours.

A coach might have developed an identity around a program.

A Board member might have children in the system while simultaneously being responsible for governing it.

Every decision carries history with it.

I’ve learned to navigate that world over more than two decades in sport management, coaching, competitions and program development.

By the time I became General Manager at Bulleen Templestowe Basketball Club, basketball was not merely an industry I worked in.

It was my professional identity.

That made what happened there much harder to separate from who I thought I was.

Long before Bulleen became the place I would later have to recover from, getting the job there felt like one of the most unlikely wins of my career.

In early 2023 I saw the Club Administrator/Manager position advertised and applied through SEEK. Basketball had always been the thread running through my working life, but by then I had spent nearly twelve years outside full-time basketball employment, building a career in business and running my own company. The opportunity at Bulleen felt like a chance to bring those two parts of my life back together.

On Sunday, 5 February 2023, the answer arrived.

I had not been selected for an interview.

The email was polite and straightforward. The Board had finalised its shortlist after receiving a competitive field of applications and I was not on it.

For a few hours, that was the end of the story.

Then, later that same afternoon, another email arrived from Lisa Gandolfo.

Something had moved in the process. The panel wanted to include me after all. I was told to expect a phone call during the week.

It was an unusual way to enter a recruitment process: rejected before I had even had the chance to speak, then pulled back into contention on the same day.

I did not need to be asked twice.

The first interview was scheduled for Monday, 13 February at 8pm at Bulleen Stadium. Roger Jeffrey, Sally Steel and Derek Pangbourne were on the panel.

I went into that room knowing I had already been outside the shortlist once. In a strange way, that helped. I had nothing to protect. I could simply tell them who I was, what I understood about basketball organisations and what I believed I could bring to Bulleen.

The interview went well.

Four days later, Roger Jeffrey emailed me directly.

'You impressed the panel so well done.'

There would be another interview, this time with other members of the Board. Julia Walsh, Lisa Gandolfo and Stuart Dorrington were identified for the final discussion, which was arranged for Tuesday, 21 February at 12.30pm.

That second interview mattered because by then this was no longer simply an interesting vacancy. I could see the possibility of returning to basketball full-time after years building a life outside it.

The process that had begun with a rejection was now down to a final Board conversation.

I won the job.

The employment contract was dated 24 February 2023. It appointed me as Club Manager, with a commencement date of 14 March 2023. The salary was $110,000 inclusive of superannuation, plus a monthly mobile phone allowance.

On 6 March, before I had even officially started, I posted publicly about what the appointment meant to me. I said I was humbled to have the opportunity to work full-time in the basketball landscape again after nearly twelve years in the corporate sector.

That part is important to remember now.

Bulleen did not begin as a bad chapter.

It began as validation.

I had applied, been rejected, been unexpectedly invited back, performed strongly enough to earn a second interview, and ultimately convinced the Board to give me the role.

I walked through the doors on 14 March 2023 believing I had earned an opportunity I had wanted for a long time.

The contract called the position Club Manager. In practice, and in the way the role developed, I became the General Manager responsible for the administration and daily operations of the Club, its financial wellbeing, staff and implementation of the Board's strategic direction.

I threw myself into it. Later, when I gave a formal statement about my employment, I estimated that although I was paid for 38 hours a week, I was probably averaging around 70. I attended games, managed staff, dealt with operations and, when needed, worked the canteen on competition days.

It mattered because basketball was not merely another industry to me. It was where I had started after school, where so much of my identity had been formed, and now I had found my way back into it full-time.

That is what makes what happened next harder to reduce to a workplace dispute.

The job I would later associate with injury, WorkCover and a long recovery process had first represented something almost opposite: a return, an opportunity and proof that a door I thought might have closed years earlier was still open.

When I arrived at Bulleen, I did not inherit an organisation cruising comfortably along. The Association had recorded an annual loss of approximately $280,000 in the financial year before I took over.

I threw myself into changing that position. The hours were enormous. The work crossed operations, staffing, competitions, finances, facilities, game days and whatever else landed in front of me. A role paid on the basis of 38 hours regularly became something closer to 70.

In less than sixteen months, the Association moved from that approximately $280,000 annual loss to an approximately $420,000 annual profit. That was a swing of around $700,000 in annual financial performance.

I do not say that because a balance sheet makes anybody indispensable. Nobody is. I say it because those figures show what I had committed to the organisation and what the work had produced.

There was another set of numbers that never appeared in a Board report.

In December 2022, before Bulleen, I weighed 113.4 kilograms. By 27 December 2023, nine months after becoming General Manager, I weighed 132.5 kilograms.

The Board could look at a financial statement and see the Association's transformation. I could look in the mirror and see mine.

I see those photographs now and I do not simply see weight. I see somebody who had allowed the responsibility of turning around an organisation to consume too much of himself.

Then came 19 June 2024.

That day changed the course of my employment and, ultimately, my life and my family's life. I left the workplace and never returned to work at Bulleen.

What remains difficult for me is not simply that the incident occurred. It is the absence of accountability I felt followed it. The Association continued. The Board continued. The competitions continued. My life did not simply continue in the same way.

The people around the table at the beginning of my Bulleen story would, in very different ways, still be present at its end. Derek Pangbourne and Sally Steel had been part of the original interview panel. The workplace incident involved Sally's husband, David Steel. By then Derek was President and Chairman of the Board. It was later Derek who advised that my fixed-term employment would conclude, and he subsequently occupied the General Manager position himself.

I do not claim to know anybody else's motive, and I do not need to. The chronology is confronting enough on its own.

I had committed extraordinary hours to helping turn around a long-standing Association. When a workplace incident then changed the trajectory of my health, employment and family life, I believed the Board should have treated accountability for what had occurred with the seriousness it warranted.

Instead, from where I stood, the institution moved forward while I carried the consequences.

For Bulleen, 19 June 2024 would eventually become a date in the past. For me, it became a dividing line between the life I had before I walked into work that morning and everything that came afterwards.

The difficult thing about major turning points is that they rarely announce themselves.

There is no moment where somebody tells you to remember the date because the next eighteen months will change the way you think about work, trust, health and your own capacity.

You go to work.

Then something happens.

Afterwards, the world is divided into before and after.

My period at Bulleen eventually became one of those dividing lines.

I am careful about how I describe it because the legal and medical records tell their own story, and because memory can become distorted when events are revisited repeatedly.

What is not in dispute is that by mid-2024 I had made a workers compensation claim arising from a psychological workplace injury, and on 30 July 2024 DXC Claims Management Services advised that the claim had been accepted.

The language of the acceptance email was clinical.

Claim accepted.

Administrative systems have a way of making human experiences look organised.

Mine was not.

I went from being somebody who spent his working life solving problems to somebody whose capacity to work was itself being assessed.

There were doctors.

Psychologists.

Certificates of capacity.

Claims managers.

Return-to-work requirements.

Pay calculations.

Treatment plans.

I had spent years being the person other people expected to make decisions.

Now other people were discussing whether I could work at all.

That was difficult to accept.

The first practical problems were almost absurd in their normality. Payroll had to be corrected because annual and personal leave had been used across periods that were subsequently covered by workers compensation. Leave loading had been paid when it should not have been. Leave balances had to be restored. Underpayments and overpayments had to be reconciled.

On 20 August 2024, after the club's accountant worked through the figures, I agreed the adjustments could be made in the next pay cycle.

It was administrative. Necessary. Fixable.

But every small administrative issue arrived while I was trying to recover from something much larger.

Then there was the laptop.

It appears repeatedly in the email record.

The club wanted its equipment back because the laptop contained access to software used in operations, including BrightSign and SurveyMonkey.

From the club's perspective, that was practical.

From mine, the repeated requests became part of a broader experience of remaining technically employed while feeling completely disconnected from the workplace.

My possessions were there.

Their property was with me.

My name still existed in the organisation.

But my actual life had moved somewhere else.

Treatment.

Recovery.

Appointments.

Trying not to think about the workplace while still receiving emails from it.

Those two realities did not sit comfortably together.

There is a part of the Bulleen story that is much harder to put on paper, but leaving it out would make everything that came later look too neat.

After the workplace incident, there were dark days. Very dark days.

I stopped sleeping properly. I stopped eating properly. I withdrew from people and became almost reclusive. Home stopped being simply where I lived and became the place I felt safest, so I avoided leaving it whenever I possibly could.

There were days when I simply could not get out of bed. Depression and anxiety could make the short walk to the bathroom or downstairs to the kitchen feel like a marathon.

That was difficult to reconcile with the person I had always been. I was a husband. I was a father. I believed I was supposed to function, provide, support and be dependable. For a period, I could barely function for myself.

I thought about suicide regularly.

The most dangerous part was that depression could make profoundly distorted thinking sound logical inside my own head. I convinced myself at times that my family might be better off without the miserable, angry and barely functioning person I believed I had become.

I understand now how wrong that thinking was. At the time, even medication intended to stabilise my thinking did not make every intrusive thought disappear.

My family had not been at work when the incident occurred, but they lived with what came home from it. They lived with the sleepless nights, the withdrawal, the anxiety and the days when Dad could not get out of bed.

Sometimes getting downstairs was the achievement.

Sometimes staying alive was the achievement.

That is uncomfortable to write, but it is true. Recovery was not simply about becoming employable again. It was about rebuilding a human being.

In August 2024, WorkSafe conducted a return-to-work inspection at Bulleen Templestowe Basketball Club.

The inspection assessed the employer's compliance with return-to-work obligations relating to my claim.

The outcome included an Entry Report Extract and improvement notices.

The day after that material was sent to me, the club wrote about improving its communication processes and provided return-to-work information.

That became the central tension of the next phase.

The employer had obligations to communicate and plan for my return.

I had obligations too.

But my treating professionals were also telling me that recovery had to come first and that contact with the workplace could itself be difficult.

What looked sensible on paper became complicated in real life.

By September the club proposed fortnightly meetings to discuss my recovery and support.

By October, correspondence became firmer. I was reminded of an obligation to maintain communication regarding recovery and rehabilitation. The laptop and keys were raised again. A courier was suggested if I could not return the items personally.

My response was direct.

I said I would be guided by my health professionals. I explained that emails of that kind were negatively affecting my mental health and that I was not ready for regular meetings with the organisation.

I had also been told that an independent party was being appointed to assist with the return-to-work process.

That party was Work Able Consulting.

Nicole Swan, an occupational therapist, contacted me in October 2024 after being engaged through DXC to assist with recovery and return-to-work support.

That was an important shift.

Until then, the language around the claim often focused on getting me back to Bulleen.

Gradually the question changed.

Could I return to Bulleen?

Then: should I return to Bulleen?

Eventually: how do we get Ryan back to work, whether or not that work is there?

Those are very different questions.

I did not know it yet, but the third question was the one that would eventually take me to Perth.

My fixed-term contract with Bulleen was due to expire on 14 March 2025.

On 26 February, President Derek Pangbourne wrote to advise that it would conclude as scheduled.

There was no dramatic dismissal meeting.

No surprise letter handed across a table.

The contract reached its end.

But an employment relationship can end neatly on paper while everything around it remains messy.

There were still personal belongings at the club and club property with me.

I asked for a lowline wall unit and a hard copy of my performance review to be couriered to my home, with the club items I held returned in the same vehicle.

The club instead formally demanded return of its property and pointed to the relevant clause in my employment contract. It said I could arrange a courier at my own expense.

DXC told me it had no jurisdiction over that industrial issue.

So I paid for the courier.

It was hardly a major event in the scheme of everything that had happened.

But it represented something.

The last physical links to the workplace were being exchanged without either side needing to be in the same room.

By late March, I told my psychologist that the club property had been delivered. I did not receive my furniture or the document I had requested.

The employment chapter was over.

The WorkCover chapter was not.

That distinction became significant because once the job disappeared, recovery was no longer about returning to a particular employer.

It was about rebuilding enough confidence, capacity and professional identity to find somewhere else to go.

For the first time, I had to consider the possibility that basketball might continue without me.

That was not easy.

When work becomes entangled with identity, unemployment is not simply the absence of income.

It can feel like the absence of self.

Recovery stories are usually written backwards.

Once somebody is doing well, every earlier event is made to look like a step towards that outcome.

Real recovery does not feel like that while you are living it.

There were good weeks.

Bad weeks.

Appointments I approached confidently and others I would rather have avoided.

There were periods where I could imagine leading an organisation again and periods where the idea felt distant.

Gregory Buck became an important part of that period.

Psychology gave me somewhere to process what had happened without needing to solve it immediately.

That mattered because problem-solving was one of the ways I had always managed uncertainty.

At work, if something was wrong, I made a list.

Who owns it?

What are the options?

What does it cost?

What happens next?

Psychological injury does not respond neatly to a project plan.

I had to learn that progress could be slower and less visible.

Eventually, though, the focus expanded.

Treatment remained important, but vocational rehabilitation started becoming more practical.

What could I do?

What roles suited my experience?

Which skills transferred beyond one employer or even beyond basketball?

Could I lead again?

Could I handle the politics of sport again?

Did I actually want to?

I began applying for roles.

I enrolled in professional development, including an AFL List Management course.

That was partly about broadening my knowledge and partly about reminding myself that my career did not have to be trapped inside one narrow pathway.

I had spent more than twenty years around sport.

Basketball was where most of my experience sat, but the underlying skills were broader: people leadership, competitions, commercial development, stakeholder management, governance, facilities, community programs, coaching, strategy.

The challenge was convincing employers of something I was still learning to believe myself.

I was employable.

I still had value. I wasn’t even 40 years of age after all.

The injury was something that had happened to me.

It was not my professional identity.

Eventually I stopped measuring progress against the person I had been before the incident and started measuring it against where I had been yesterday.

First it was getting out of bed. Then leaving the house. Then engaging with people again. Then allowing myself to think about work without immediately feeling overwhelmed.

By December 2025 I weighed 136 kilograms.

That number became another marker for me. I did not want my recovery to be measured only by whether somebody would employ me again. I wanted structure in three parts of my life: body, mind and spirit.

I began taking responsibility for my physical health again while continuing psychology, vocational rehabilitation and professional development. I enrolled in an AFL List Management course because I wanted to keep learning rather than sit around waiting for somebody else to decide whether I still had something to offer sport.

The applications became part of that structure too. Every application required me to imagine a future. Every interview required me to speak about leadership with confidence. Every rejection forced me to decide whether I would go again.

Slowly, the different parts started moving in the same direction.

By 15 August 2026, after I had returned to executive employment in Perth, I weighed 119.8 kilograms. More than sixteen kilograms had gone since December.

The number was not really the story. The important part was that I recognised the person in the photograph again.

Body. Mind. Spirit.

I was not trying to become the person I had been before Bulleen. I was trying to become a better, more structured version of myself.

By early 2026, job seeking had become a discipline.

Vacancy appears.

Research the organisation.

Read the annual report.

Study the financials if they are made available.

Understand the competition structure.

Look at the Board.

Prepare the application.

Wait.

Sometimes the answer was quick.

Sometimes there was no answer.

Sometimes I interviewed well and still did not progress.

Coburg was one of those disappointments.

I remember emailing Kate Southall at Work Able after hearing that I had not been successful. It surprised me and flattened me for a few hours.

But that same day I had another interview to prepare for.

Perry Lakes.

Kate's approach was practical.

Focus on the next closest positive result.

It was good advice.

At roughly the same time, there were opportunities at Gold Coast Basketball, Perth Basketball Association, Rockhampton Basketball and later Townsville, Wanneroo, Eltham, Logan and others.

The volume of applications can look impressive in hindsight.

Living through it felt different.

Every application required enough optimism to imagine a future with an organisation that might never call.

Every interview required me to talk confidently about leadership while privately wondering whether the market saw me the same way.

The deeper I progressed, the more I prepared.

For Perth Basketball Association, I asked for greater breakdown of participant income and employment costs so I could understand what was driving the numbers.

For Rockhampton, I reviewed financial information and prepared a vision.

For Perry Lakes, I prepared an organisational structure response before the second interview so the panel could see how I thought rather than simply hear rehearsed interview answers.

That preparation mattered because I was not looking for any job.

I was looking for the right opportunity to properly return.

By April and May 2026, several possibilities were alive at once.

For the first time since the injury, the question was not whether anybody would employ me.

It was which future I would choose.

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.

The Perry Lakes process began with an interview on 22 April 2026.

The panel included Morgan Harland, Rocky Condo, Kylie Chamberlain and an Employii HR consultant.

The Teams link almost became a story of its own when it did not arrive as expected, but eventually the meeting happened.

I came out of it feeling unusually positive.

I wrote to the panel afterwards and told them the discussion had strengthened my interest in the role.

They asked for references.

I provided four.

A week later Employii told me my referees were being contacted and that the next step, if successful, would be a second-round interview.

That interview would be in Perth.

The Board gave me an organisational scenario.

How would I assess whether the current workforce structure was fit for purpose?

How would I balance budgets, timeframes, risk, existing staff preferences, culture, resource allocation and stakeholder expectations?

That was the kind of problem I enjoyed.

I sent my response through before I travelled so the panel had time to absorb it.

The second interview was held at Bendat Basketball Centre on 7 May.

Afterwards I felt something I had not felt strongly in a long time.

Belonging.

I could see myself there.

I could see the work.

I could see what the Association could become.

I wrote to the panel the next morning.

There was no hiding that it was my dream role, I said.

That line would matter later because it demonstrated the truth of my decision to move.

I did not relocate across Australia because I had run out of options.

I relocated because I genuinely believed Perry Lakes was the opportunity I had been working towards.

The Perth interview carried another significance that had nothing to do with basketball.

My half-brother Kane lived in Perth.

Kane and I had been estranged for much of our lives. Our father had not been part of my life since I was eleven, and the consequences of that family history meant Kane and I never had the ordinary experience of growing up together as brothers.

By the time Perry Lakes brought me to Western Australia, we were both mature enough to understand that we could not rewrite childhood, but we could decide what adulthood looked like.

We spent time together while I was there for the interview and discovered how many interests we shared. There was no manufactured reconciliation or dramatic moment. We simply had the chance to know each other properly, and the bond began to solidify.

That made Perth feel different. Professionally, I was being offered the chance to rebuild a career. Personally, I was being given the chance to rebuild a relationship with my brother.

One trip west unexpectedly offered me two opportunities to recover something I had lost.

A career and a brother.

Whatever ultimately happened with Perry Lakes, I would never regard my time in Perth as entirely lost. In one profoundly important respect, I would leave Western Australia with more family than I had when I arrived.

On 12 May, Morgan called.

After the conversation I sent through the vision and structure material he wanted to circulate to the Board.

His response said they would have a draft contract for me by Friday.

By 22 May the contract arrived.

That same day Rockhampton Basketball sent through an offer of its own.

For a short period I had a choice.

Rockhampton had been transparent about its challenges and I respected that enormously.

But the Perry Lakes opportunity had been presented as a financially stable Association seeking a basketball person with business acumen who could help drive the organisation forward.

I chose Perth.

On 24 May I signed the contract.

The next chapter had a start date.

8 June 2026.

Accepting a job and relocating for it are two different decisions.

The contract made the first one official.

The bags being packed and my son helping me jam my car full with as many belongings I could fit made the second one real.

My family was staying in Victoria initially, which meant I would be building a working life in Perth without the people who normally made home feel like home.

Accepting the Perry Lakes job was not easy simply because it was the opportunity I had wanted.

I was still a husband and a father. Taking the role meant moving more than 2,700 kilometres away from Catherine and Jordan while they remained in Victoria initially.

For virtually my entire adult life I had never lived alone. I moved out of home at nineteen and moved in with Catherine. I had never known adulthood any other way. Eventually two became three, and family life became the rhythm around everything else.

Going to Perth meant discovering, for the first time in my adult life, what life looked like when it was just me.

I did not see that as running away from my family. I believed I needed to rebuild myself fully so I could become a better version of myself for them.

There was something else I wanted Jordan to see. As a father, I could tell my son not to be frightened of opportunities outside his comfort zone, but eventually children become old enough to notice whether their parents live the advice they give.

I wanted him to see me take a chance. Move across Australia. Back myself. Accept discomfort rather than let fear make the decision.

Living alone created challenges I had never thought about. I consider myself a capable cook, but cooking for one is very different from cooking for three. Shopping, portion sizes, leftovers and routine all change when there is nobody else at the table.

At the same time I was trying to continue losing weight. I could not move to Perth and replace family dinners with takeaway simply because nobody was watching. Part of the structure I had rebuilt was physical discipline, and living alone made that entirely my responsibility.

Shopping properly. Cooking properly. Portion control. Exercise. Routine. Not eating because I was bored or lonely. Not using a long workday as an excuse to abandon the progress I had made.

For years I had been comfortable taking responsibility for organisations and other people. Perth forced me to take responsibility for myself in a completely different way.

Body. Mind. Spirit. Career. Family.

The irony was that I went west believing the biggest challenge would be leading Perry Lakes Hawks. In some ways, the bigger challenge was learning to lead myself.

I packed.

I organised temporary accommodation.

I chose a laptop and monitor so I could be ready from Day One.

I exchanged emails with Kylie about the CEO announcement, the photo they would use and the significant Bendat court problem that had already become the Association's immediate operational headache.

Courts 1 and 2 were closed because of structural issues.

The NBL1 game scheduled around my arrival was postponed.

The Board still arranged an informal catch-up.

I drove west, and my family planned to fly over so their arrival would coincide with mine and they could help me get set up.

There is something psychologically useful about crossing Australia by road.

The change does not happen instantly.

Victoria does not disappear because an aircraft door closes.

You watch the country change.

Kilometres accumulate.

Familiar becomes unfamiliar gradually.

By 4 June I was in Perth.

I had a temporary place lined up at The Tide in Scarborough, which Kane had inspected on my behalf before I arrived, and I was due to collect the keys.

I emailed Kylie to say I had arrived and asked whether I should call into the stadium informally with my family or wait until I had properly met the Board.

I wanted to get started.

The first day was still several days away, but psychologically I had already begun.

Once I accepted Perry Lakes, excitement very quickly collided with logistics.

I needed somewhere to live, and I needed to find it from Melbourne.

Looking back through my emails, I had begun searching almost immediately.

East Perth. Leederville. Glendalough. Rivervale. Perth. Scarborough.

At least ten identifiable accommodation options passed through my inbox and Sent folder before I arrived in Western Australia.

Some had no inspection times available. Some required an inspection before an application could even be considered. Some required an inspection code.

I asked for video walkthroughs. I asked agents whether they would accept an application remotely. I explained the same circumstances over and over again: I had accepted a CEO position in Floreat, I was relocating from Victoria and I would arrive in Perth on 6 June.

Kane became my eyes on the ground. Where possible I tried to arrange for him to inspect properties for me. On one occasion he was supposed to attend an inspection but could not get away from work, so I immediately contacted the agent trying to find another solution.

One agent went out of her way to send me a video inspection of a Rivervale apartment. I remember thanking her and telling her how difficult it was trying to navigate the process from the other side of the country.

At the same time I was contacting interstate removalists about moving belongings from Chirnside Park to Western Australia.

I was not simply looking for a rental. I was building the practical foundations of a completely new life while still living more than 3,000 kilometres away from it.

Eventually I found The Tide at Scarborough.

Before Kane had even attended the inspection, I asked for the application form so I could have everything ready. I supplied my Perry Lakes employment contract, rental history, tenant ledger, mortgage information and Catherine’s income information.

Kane inspected it. I followed up. On 2 June, four days before I was due to arrive in Perth, the email finally came.

Room 202 was mine.

I paid $2,500 to secure it.

Four days later I would arrive in Western Australia. Two days after that I would start as Chief Executive Officer of Perry Lakes Hawks.

I had done everything you are supposed to do when committing to a major new role.

I was not testing Perth. I was moving there.

The Tide was supposed to make the landing easier.

Room 202 was $625 a week and the lease ran from 5 June to 4 September. It was furnished, near the coast, included utilities and gave me somewhere to start while I worked out what permanent life in Perth might look like.

Within the first week, however, I was already raising concerns.

There was evidence of historical water damage around the entry and a musty smell I could not seem to get rid of. I opened the window and burned scented candles when I was home, but the smell remained.

Keeping the window open created another problem. Room 202 sat beside West Coast Highway, and the traffic and late-night noise made sleep difficult.

On 13 June, barely a week after moving in, I emailed the property manager and asked about my options. Could I move rooms? Could I source alternative accommodation? Could I leave without being penalised?

I was not there on holiday. I had moved to Perth to lead a major basketball association, and I wanted to walk into work each morning sharp, focused and ready.

Over the following weeks I raised further concerns about the room and common areas, including carpet staining, the condition of washing-machine seals, a pothole near my allocated car space and the air-conditioning unit.

Management disputed my belief that the water-stained area represented mould and later advised that a contractor had found no evidence of mould. They also offered another room and maintained that I remained liable for rent until a replacement tenant could be found.

That distinction matters. I can say what I saw, what concerned me and how I felt while living there. I cannot say as fact that the room caused me to become unwell.

Some of the issues I raised were subsequently addressed. The pothole was repaired, cleaners were reminded about the washing machines, the air-conditioning was to be investigated and the carpet was being considered for replacement.

But by then I had lost confidence in the accommodation. I offered to surrender my bond in an effort to resolve the matter and eventually left.

The Tide was a false start.

When I was later approved for Adelaide Terrace, East Perth at $635 a week, I signed a twelve-month lease, paid the bond and rent, organised internet and started dealing with the ordinary frustrations of making an apartment home.

That was different.

I had decided to live in Perth.

That is why handing those keys back tomorrow means something. The first place had been temporary. Adelaide Terrace was supposed to be home.

I started as CEO on Monday, 8 June 2026.

The next day I emailed my DXC case manager because she had asked me to confirm when I commenced new employment.

Her reply began: congratulations on starting your new job.

Then the workers compensation administration changed around the fact that I was earning again.

There was something quietly significant in that.

For nearly two years, paperwork had measured incapacity, treatment and recovery.

Now the system needed my weekly earnings because I had returned to employment.

I was back.

Perry Lakes had also created a detailed CEO Onboarding Framework with a commencement date of 8 June and a review date set for the 90-day mark.

The framework was designed to create clarity upward to the Board and downward to the General Manager. It defined authority boundaries, 30, 60 and 90-day expectations, Board approval thresholds and the intended separation between CEO strategy and GM operations.

It even referred to supporting my personal transition to Perth.

On paper, it was excellent.

I took it seriously.

The framework said the first phase was about listening, learning and establishing relationships.

That suited me.

I did not arrive believing everything needed to change on Monday morning.

But listening only has value if you are prepared to respond to what you hear.

And within days I was hearing enough to make me concerned about whether the organisation itself was ready for the new structure it had created.

The first warning light appeared almost immediately.

On 11 June I met with Kylie Chamberlain, my Board Sponsor.

I was trying to understand tension around the CEO role and the existing staff structure.

The problem was not that somebody disagreed with me. I expected disagreement.

The question was whether the organisation had properly prepared long-serving staff for what the creation of a CEO position meant.

A new layer of leadership changes reporting relationships.

It changes who owns decisions.

It changes who attends which conversations.

It changes what the Board expects from staff and what staff expect from the Board.

If those boundaries are not clear, everyone can believe they are acting appropriately while pulling in different directions.

The next evening, by my recollection, I raised serious concerns with Secretary Justin Ford over dinner.

I had been in the job for five days.

Three days after I started, on 11 June, I had also contacted my WorkCover case manager privately. I told her that the role, expectations and organisational environment were already appearing different from what had been represented during recruitment. I was not resigning or making accusations. I was asking for advice before making any decision.

That email matters because it existed long before the termination, long before Fair Work and long before there was any reason to reconstruct the story after the fact.

Then on 2 July, three and a half weeks into the role, I told vocational adviser Kate Southall that the job had been interesting and at times very frustrating, that long-established ways of working were making change difficult and that I had a Board meeting that night which might tell me whether the role was genuinely tenable.

Those were contemporaneous warning signs, recorded while I was still doing everything I could to make the appointment work.

That date became important later.

I was not inventing a story about workplace resistance after my employment ended.

I was telling Board members almost immediately that I could see problems in the structure and culture I had inherited.

At the same time, I was still highly motivated by the role.

Those two things were not contradictory.

A difficult organisation can still be an exciting organisation to lead.

In fact, the problems were part of why the job appealed to me.

I liked solving problems.

I just needed to know the Board wanted them solved too.

I had not moved across the country to simply occupy the CEO's chair. I wanted to build something.

Almost immediately I could see enormous potential in Perry Lakes Hawks. There was history, scale, passionate people, thousands of players and families, volunteers, coaches, referees and an established basketball community.

I could also see how much opportunity was sitting there unrealised. In a number of areas, the Association was well behind where I believed a modern sporting organisation of its size and standing could be.

Processes needed structure. Communication needed improvement. Roles needed clarity. Systems needed modernising. Commercial opportunities needed exploring. The way information was collected, presented and used could become more sophisticated.

I did not see those things as an attack on the people who had come before me. I saw opportunity.

And I became consumed by it.

My working day rarely ended when I walked out of the office. I would come home, make dinner, sit down and watch television for a while and try to switch off.

Then I would look across at the laptop.

Before long it would be open again.

An hour would disappear. Then another. Sometimes several.

I would research what other sporting organisations were doing, work through financial information, develop structures, review processes, write proposals, build presentations, analyse staffing requirements and think about how we could improve the experience for everyone who interacted with Perry Lakes Hawks.

Because I was living alone, there was nobody telling me it was time to put the laptop away. So often I did not.

The apartment became an extension of the CEO's office.

Dinner. Television. Laptop. Work. Sleep. Repeat.

Nobody had ordered me to work those hours. I did it because I could see what the Association could become.

That is important to everything that followed. When I eventually stood my ground on issues of ethics, governance and what I believed were the best interests of the Association, it was not because I did not care about Perry Lakes Hawks.

It was precisely because I cared so much.

Perhaps the best evidence of my commitment was not what happened during office hours. It was what happened afterwards: night after night in a small apartment in Perth, with my family 2,700 kilometres away, the television playing in the background and a laptop glowing in front of me, still trying to make the Association better.

Perry Lakes was not a small community Association.

The scale became clearer every day.

Junior domestic basketball alone involved hundreds of teams and more than three thousand registered players.

There were more than four hundred children waiting for opportunities.

There were six domestic clubs, representative teams, NBL1 programs, development pathways, referees, coaches, schools, sponsors, volunteers and multiple venues.

The problem was not demand.

The problem was capacity.

Court capacity.

Referee capacity.

Staff capacity.

Systems capacity.

The Bendat closure made that brutally obvious.

Courts 1 and 2 were unavailable, disrupting dozens of junior games and affecting NBL1 operations.

A court problem became a competition problem, a participant problem and a financial problem all at once.

I started mapping what the Association actually used each week and comparing it with what was booked.

My July notes recorded inconsistencies between court bookings and actual usage. They also recorded meetings with Basketball WA and stadium management, plus contact with schools and venues across the western suburbs.

I wanted a broader footprint.

Lords Recreation Centre could become more than an occasional overflow venue.

John XXIII College presented a possible long-term partnership and even the possibility of a new club or catchment.

I contacted Scotch, PLC, Trinity, St Mary's and others.

The strategic question was simple.

If hundreds of children wanted to play but we had nowhere to put them, how could we create capacity rather than simply administer the shortage?

That was the kind of work I believed a CEO should be doing.

Not only asking how to survive next Saturday.

Asking how to make next year larger than this year.

The financial statements told one story.

The underlying systems told another.

At a high level Perry Lakes was financially stable.

The Association was profitable, held strong cash reserves and had meaningful net assets.

That was one of the reasons I had been comfortable relocating.

This was not an insolvent organisation asking a new CEO to rescue it.

But financial stability does not eliminate the need for financial discipline.

Profit had declined from the previous year.

Employment expenses had increased.

Junior competitions appeared to be one of the strongest revenue engines.

NBL1 carried a significant cost relative to its direct income.

Sponsorship had room to grow.

Court hire was substantial.

Administration costs had increased.

Merchandise and inventory deserved scrutiny.

I wanted the Board to see the organisation by program, not only as one annual profit and loss statement.

Junior domestic.

WABL.

NBL1.

Camps.

Clinics.

Merchandise.

Sponsorship.

Administration.

Which areas generated surplus?

Which broke even?

Which were deliberately subsidised because they produced strategic value?

A Board can choose to subsidise an NBL1 program heavily. There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

But it should know the amount and understand what value it expects in return.

Good governance is not about eliminating every loss-making activity.

It is about making losses intentional rather than accidental.

The more we examined the accounting environment, the more obvious it became that moving from QuickBooks Online to Xero could not simply be a software migration.

An independent review was undertaken in July.

The findings were significant.

Payroll items were not fully mapped to the chart of accounts.

Payroll clearing and liability accounts had not been reconciled.

PAYG withholding and superannuation liability accounts had not been reconciled.

Wage expense accounts did not reconcile to STP reporting.

Some wage and superannuation payments had been coded in ways the reviewer considered inappropriate.

Customer credits from earlier years had not been applied to invoices.

Supplier payments remained unapplied.

The Commonwealth Bank account was recorded as $1,000 out of balance after the 30 June reconciliation, with unreconciled transactions remaining.

Several other accounts had never been reconciled.

Inventory and payment-platform processes were heavily manual.

Shopify, Square and Stripe raised integration and reconciliation questions.

The recommendation was not to blindly import the historical transactions into Xero.

Instead, consideration should be given to establishing a clean Xero file using verified opening balances.

That document mattered enormously to me because it separated perception from evidence.

I did not need to call anybody dishonest.

I did not need to allege fraud.

The specialist review documented legacy accounting and control deficiencies that required attention.

Intent was not the issue.

Responsibility was.

Once the CEO knows the accounts require remediation, the CEO has to act.

You cannot discover unreconciled liabilities and then decide they are inconvenient to discuss.

You fix them.

The same principle applied to information.

An Association with thousands of members accumulates enormous amounts of data.

Participant records.

Financial information.

Historical documents.

Programs.

Contacts.

Sponsors.

Staff records.

Policies.

Operational knowledge.

My early observations raised concerns that important Association information was spread across personal laptops used by staff rather than sitting in a secure, centrally controlled environment.

That created obvious questions.

Who owned the files?

Where were they backed up?

Who could access them?

What happened if a staff member resigned tomorrow?

Could the Association recover the records?

Was personal information separated properly from Association information?

Again, this was not dramatic work.

Nobody joins a basketball club because the CEO created better cloud storage.

But governance is full of things that look boring until the day they fail.

I wanted Association data on Association systems.

I wanted managed devices, proper backups, documented access and a structure that did not depend on individual people carrying institutional knowledge around on personal equipment.

That was why I explored new IT arrangements and stronger security.

It was the same reason I wanted a better bookkeeping process, Xero, clearer accounts and improved reporting.

Modernising a basketball association did not mean changing the logo or posting more often on Instagram.

It meant strengthening the systems nobody saw.

Systems are easier than people.

A chart of accounts does not have feelings about being changed.

An organisational chart does.

Before I arrived, long-serving staff had kept the Association functioning through years of changing Boards and leadership arrangements.

That history deserved respect.

It also created complexity.

The Board had appointed its first CEO while existing roles and informal ways of working had developed over a long period.

My job was to determine what structure the Association needed next.

I considered high-performance leadership, marketing and media capability, competition and community programs, administration and finance support.

I looked at how trust, bookkeeping and accounting functions should be separated.

I considered whether the General Manager role and long-term administration roles were clear enough in a structure that now had a CEO above them.

The Board had already approved recognition bonuses for Jenny and Annette before I commenced, acknowledging the additional effort they had carried while recruitment was underway. I was asked whether I wanted to present those bonuses to them.

That mattered because the story was never as simple as a new CEO arriving and disliking old staff.

I understood the contribution they had made.

I also believed the Association needed clearer roles, modern systems and stronger accountability.

Respecting past service and changing future structure are not mutually exclusive.

But they can feel that way to the people experiencing the change.

Not everything I worked on was governance and spreadsheets.

The basketball itself still mattered most.

Junior domestic participation was large, but demand exceeded capacity.

I began reshaping the calendar for summer 2026-27 and winter 2027.

I looked at age groups from the youngest introductory competitions through to teenagers and senior community basketball.

I wanted clearer pathways and more opportunities.

Summer basketball could expand the Association beyond the traditional season.

Senior community leagues could keep participants connected after juniors.

Walking basketball, all-abilities programs and wheelchair basketball could broaden who the Association served.

A community sporting organisation should not define success only by the number of elite players it produces.

Success is also the seven-year-old who finds a team.

The teenager who keeps playing instead of dropping out.

The adult who comes back to the sport.

The participant with a disability who is offered a genuine pathway rather than a token program.

The parent who becomes a coach.

The young referee who develops enough confidence to progress.

The club pathway map, catchment work and discussions about new domestic clubs were all part of the same idea.

Grow the base properly and everything above it becomes stronger.

Referees are one of the clearest examples of a system people notice only when it fails.

The Association had around 180 active officials, but the structure was bottom-heavy.

There were many developing referees and comparatively fewer experienced officials capable of carrying higher-level games.

Availability could be thin.

WABL Sundays were particularly demanding.

There were also cultural issues to address: accountability, professionalism, phone use while on duty and the absence of a sufficiently structured entry pathway.

I compared rates with Victoria and looked at development levels.

Pay is not the only reason people referee, but remuneration communicates value.

If you want experienced officials, you need a pathway that makes progression visible and worthwhile.

That meant clearer courses, coaching, supervision and accountability.

Again, the goal was not to criticise what existed.

It was to create something sustainable.

The broader theme was becoming obvious.

Perry Lakes had scale.

It had history.

It had people who cared.

What it needed, in my view, was stronger structure around that energy.

That was exactly what I thought I had been employed to build.

On 1 July 2026, I emailed Greg.

I had been meaning to thank him for some time.

The psychology sessions after Bulleen had given me somewhere to process what had happened and helped me regain confidence.

I told him I was proud to be the CEO of a basketball association in Perth.

Then I wrote that after a month in the chair I had greater clarity, resilience and focus than at any other point in my adult life.

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

Greg replied later that month.

He congratulated me and described the CEO appointment as a great return.

He said the clarity and confidence were obvious in my message.

That exchange is one of the most important pieces of this story because it prevents the ending from rewriting the middle.

It would be easy to assume, knowing I was terminated in August, that the Perry Lakes experience must have been psychologically damaging from the beginning.

It wasn't.

I was energised.

I was engaged.

I enjoyed the challenge.

I felt professionally restored.

At the same time, I was concerned about governance, staff relationships and whether the Board would support the changes the role required.

Both things were true.

I could be thriving personally and still identify organisational problems.

In fact, I believed the reason I was identifying them so clearly was because I was functioning well.

By July, the central contradiction of the role was impossible to ignore.

I had been recruited to change things.

Change was creating resistance.

That does not mean every person who disagreed with me was resistant to progress.

Sometimes people disagreed because I was wrong.

Sometimes because I moved too quickly.

Sometimes because I had not explained the reason well enough.

Sometimes because different people had different legitimate priorities.

But there was also a structural issue I kept returning to.

Did the Association actually accept what appointing a CEO meant?

The onboarding framework created a clear distinction between Board, CEO and General Manager.

The CEO was strategic and accountable to the Board.

The GM owned day-to-day operations.

The Board Sponsor was there to provide clarity and support.

The reality felt less settled.

I documented concerns about hierarchy, role clarity and staff acceptance of the new structure.

I sought clearer boundaries and stronger Board support.

I was also physically separated in an office arrangement that, from my perspective, made everyday staff interaction harder rather than easier.

Small things compound.

An unclear reporting line.

A conversation held without the person who thinks they own the issue.

Feedback travelling around rather than directly.

A decision questioned after it is made.

A Board member stepping into operations.

A CEO stepping too far into operations because the boundaries are not functioning.

None of these necessarily breaks an organisation.

Together they can make leadership almost impossible.

The Board Sponsor relationship mattered because it was supposed to be the place where ambiguity could be resolved early.

The onboarding framework contemplated first-week debriefs and 30, 60 and 90-day milestone reviews.

Its purpose was to make sure there were no surprises.

My concern, as the weeks went on, was that adverse commentary about me may have been moving through that channel without being consistently put back to me in a way I could respond to.

I want to be careful here.

I cannot know every conversation that occurred between staff and Board members.

I cannot know what somebody else believed unless they said it or recorded it.

What I can say is that if staff had genuine concerns about my leadership, I wanted to understand them.

Tell me I am moving too quickly.

Tell me my communication is landing badly.

Tell me a decision has confused people.

Tell me someone thinks I have overstepped.

Then give me the opportunity to explain, adjust or disagree.

That is what probation and onboarding are for.

A probation period should not require a new executive to guess what concerns are accumulating around them.

It should be the safest period for direct feedback because everybody knows the appointment is still settling.

The later significance of this was obvious.

When the termination letter referred to leadership and conduct concerns, I was left asking how those concerns had been assessed, what I had been told and whether the structured onboarding process had actually been used to resolve them before the decision was made.

At some point, accumulated tension found its way into a heated discussion with Kylie.

The termination letter would later refer to that exchange.

I do not need to pretend I was emotionless in every workplace conversation to defend the substance of what I was trying to do.

I can be direct.

When I believe something matters, I push.

And when I believe I am being held accountable for an outcome without being given the authority or support required to achieve it, frustration can show.

With hindsight, there are always conversations a leader can handle differently.

I accept that.

The important question is context.

By the time of that discussion, I had already raised concerns about staff relationships, role ambiguity and Board support over a period of weeks.

I believed I was accountable for leading an inherited team while the Board had not adequately resolved the authority and behavioural issues I had been escalating.

Others may remember those conversations differently.

That is fair.

But the exchange should not be treated as though it appeared from nowhere.

It belonged to a longer pattern of unresolved tension around what the CEO role actually controlled and how the new structure was supposed to work.

Leadership is not proven by never becoming frustrated.

It is proven by whether the underlying issue is legitimate, whether the leader is prepared to reflect on their own conduct and whether the organisation has mechanisms to resolve conflict before it becomes terminal.

I believed those mechanisms existed on paper.

I was less convinced they existed in practice.

The onboarding framework had a number embedded in it from the beginning.

Ninety days.

Thirty days to listen and learn.

Sixty days to build momentum.

Ninety days to lead, deliver and set the agenda.

At the 90-day mark, the framework contemplated a formal confidence discussion involving the Chair and Board.

I never reached it.

On 19 August 2026, approximately seventy-two days after I started, I was given a letter headed "Termination of Employment - Unsuccessful Completion of Probation."

The letter raised concerns about leadership, conduct, interactions with the Board, following instructions and communication.

My employment was over.

There was a surreal quality to the speed of it.

Only weeks earlier I had been building a new accounting environment, working through staffing structures including hiring three new staff, meeting venue partners, planning competition reform and analysing commercial arrangements.

Now the Association was moving on without me.

The Board offered access to counselling sessions and $1,000 towards relocation expenses.

The practical generosity of that did not change the basic reality.

I had moved across Australia for a two-year appointment.

It had lasted seventy-two days.

The question I kept returning to was not whether the Board possessed a contractual right to terminate during probation.

Probation exists for a reason.

The question was whether the process and explanation fairly reflected what had actually been happening inside the Association during those seventy-two days.

Had the issues I raised been treated as evidence of diligence or disruption?

Had staff concerns been tested?

Had I been given clear feedback and a meaningful chance to address it?

Had the Board's own 30, 60 and 90-day onboarding structure been used as intended?

Had the organisation wanted change until change became uncomfortable?

Those questions were now bigger than my employment.

They went to how Boards recruit, support and govern executives in community sport.

After the termination, there was an immediate question about how the Association would communicate my departure.

I was shown proposed wording.

One version was not acceptable to me because it suggested a voluntary departure or personal reasons.

That was not what happened.

I had not resigned.

I had not decided to return to Melbourne because I missed my family.

The Board had ended my employment during probation.

I was prepared to keep the public statement professional and restrained.

I did not need the reasons argued publicly.

I did not need a public attack on the Board.

But I did need the basic fact to be accurate.

The final statement said that I was no longer in the CEO role and that my employment had concluded during the agreed probationary period.

It also acknowledged that I had brought significant energy and fresh thinking to the organisation and introduced initiatives and projects the Board and staff intended to continue progressing.

That sentence stayed with me.

The work was useful enough to continue.

The person doing it was not.

I do not say that sarcastically.

Organisations are entitled to continue good ideas after people leave.

In fact, I hope they do.

The point was simply that the public statement itself acknowledged something important.

The seventy-two days were not empty.

There had been substantial work.

The termination immediately turned into a housing problem.

Only weeks earlier I had signed a twelve-month lease, paid the bond and rent, ordered an internet connection and begun treating Adelaide Terrace as home. Every practical decision I was making assumed I would still be living in Perth well into 2027.

I contacted the property manager at Adelaide Terrace on 19 August.

I explained that my probationary employment had been discontinued and that I would now need to return to Melbourne.

The next day the agency sent through the break-lease process and the potential costs.

Rent could continue until a replacement tenant was found.

There were advertising costs.

Condition-report fees.

Tenancy database checks.

A pro-rata letting-fee reimbursement.

The precise final amount would depend on how quickly the property may be re-let.

This was the practical side of interstate recruitment that employment contracts rarely capture.

A job can end in one meeting.

A lease cannot.

By 23 August I had completed the break-lease form and was asking how quickly the property could be advertised.

I explained that I had relocated in good faith on the basis of the employment and that without income in Perth I could not justify maintaining the apartment while my family remained in Victoria.

I asked for every reasonable effort to re-let the property quickly.

The initial inspection is scheduled for the same day I intend to vacate: tomorrow.

I simply need to know where to put the keys.

Once they are handed back, I will be in the car.

That sentence in the email is almost brutally practical.

Once I leave the apartment, I will no longer be in Perth to return to or attend the property.

There will be no emotional flourish.

There is a route east and a departure time.

On 21 August 2026, I lodged a Form F8 unfair dismissal application with the Fair Work Commission.

The submission receipt gave me a reference number and told me a case number would follow.

I knew probation created legal complexity.

The purpose of the application was not to pretend the Board had no right to manage probation.

It was to challenge the circumstances and process surrounding the termination and to put my account on the record.

I have spent too much of the previous two years learning what happens when workplace events are reduced to somebody else's summary.

Documentation matters.

Dates matter.

Contemporaneous emails matter.

What somebody knew at the time matters.

That does not mean I want the book of my life to become a legal brief.

It does mean I am no longer willing to assume that truth would automatically survive without records.

The strange part is how quickly the administrative machinery resumed.

One workplace dispute had ended in WorkCover.

Now another employment relationship has put me before Fair Work.

The obvious interpretation would be that I had become somebody who could not stay away from workplace conflict.

I reject that.

There is another interpretation.

I care deeply about doing things properly, and I am prepared to challenge decisions when I believe process, ethics or governance matter.

That can make life harder.

It may also be one of the reasons I am suited to leadership in the first place.

The flight booking from 8 August has become a small but important detail.

When I originally booked the flights, they had a completely different purpose.

My U16 Maroondah Magic team, which includes Jordan, was due to play a semi-final on 12 September. Even though I was living and working in Perth, I had every intention of getting back to Melbourne to coach them.

That was important to me.

I had moved across Australia to rebuild my career, but I was still Jordan’s dad and still his coach. Living in Perth was never supposed to mean disappearing from the parts of his life that mattered.

So on 8 August, I booked the flights.

At that point there was nothing unusual about them. They were simply part of the balancing act I had accepted when I moved west: work in Perth, family in Melbourne, and flights when I needed to be there for the moments that mattered.

Then, on 19 August, the unthinkable happened.

My employment at Perry Lakes ended.

Suddenly there was no longer any need to preserve a September trip from Perth to Melbourne. I was not going to be living in Perth by then.

So I paid another $350 and changed the booking.

I brought the Melbourne leg forward so I could get home and spend the weekend with my family after everything that had happened.

I also changed the return leg so that tomorrow, 25 August, I can fly back to Perth one final time.

But I am not going back to work.

I am going back to leave.

Tonight, 24 August, I am sitting in Melbourne with my family.

Tomorrow morning I will board a flight west, land in Perth, return to Adelaide Terrace, load the last of my belongings into the car and hand back the keys to an apartment I had expected to call home for the next twelve months.

Then I will fill the tank.

And drive east.

There is something extraordinary about how quickly the meaning of a plane ticket can change.

On 8 August, those flights represented a future in Perth and my determination to remain present in my son’s life despite living on the other side of Australia.

Sixteen days later, the booking has become part of the logistics of dismantling that future.

The flight west tomorrow is not taking me back to my job.

It is taking me back to collect what is left of my Perth life so I can bring it home.

By the time I write these words on 24 August, I have not even returned to Perth to collect my car.

But something else has already begun.

The search.

Perry Lakes ended my employment on 19 August.

That same day, I started applying for jobs.

Not the following week. Not after I had driven home. Not after I had given myself a month to work out what had just happened.

That day.

Among the first were General Manager roles with Chelsea and District Basketball Association and the Goulburn Valley League.

Over the next days the applications and enquiries continued across basketball, sport, operations and commercial leadership.

The SEEK activity I can see tonight captures at least twenty-two roles or application actions between 19 and 21 August alone, including opportunities with Bunbury Basketball, Basketball Victoria, Southern Peninsula Basketball, City of Swan, Curtin University, Darebin City Council, Doncaster Basketball and the Mornington Peninsula Football Netball League, alongside operations, strategy, membership, sales and business development roles.

Some applications were lodged directly through SEEK. Others took me to an employer’s application site. The point is not the exact count.

The point is that I was moving.

There is probably a version of me from a few years ago who would have responded very differently to what happened at Perry Lakes.

I know that because I met him after Bulleen.

He went home. He closed the curtains. He stopped functioning.

This time, I opened SEEK.

That distinction might sound trivial on a page. To me, it is enormous.

The greatest evidence of how far I have come is not a title, a photograph or a number on the scales.

It is what I did on day seventy-three. I kept going.

Among all the opportunities I have pursued since 19 August, one feels different.

Cairns Basketball. General Manager.

I applied through Sportspeople on the evening of 19 August, the same day Perry Lakes ended my employment.

Two days later, on Friday 21 August, my phone rang.

A member of the Cairns Basketball Board wanted to talk.

Nothing is guaranteed. A conversation is not an appointment. An interview is not a contract. A promising opportunity can disappear very quickly.

I know that better than most.

But I would be lying if I said the possibility does not excite me.

I am pumped by it.

Cairns represents something completely different again: the tropics, a regional community, and a basketball organisation with its own identity, challenges and opportunities.

After spending so much of my basketball life around Melbourne and then stepping into one of Western Australia’s biggest associations, there is something genuinely exciting about the thought of taking that experience into a regional environment.

Regional sport feels different. An association is not simply somewhere people turn up on game night. It becomes part of the community.

People know each other. Families grow up around clubs. Volunteers matter. Relationships matter. When things are going well, everyone celebrates together. When things get hard, people wrap their arms around each other.

In Far North Queensland, that is not just a sporting metaphor. Tropical communities live with cyclones, floods, storms, damaged homes, disrupted businesses and roads that can be cut off.

When those things happen, communities do not get through them because somebody writes a strategic plan. They get through them because people help each other.

That resonates with me.

Probably more now than it would have two years ago.

I know something about what it means to be knocked down. I know what it feels like when circumstances suddenly change the direction of your life. I know the value of people who do not disappear when things become uncomfortable.

I could bring big-city basketball experience, commercial thinking, governance, operations, competition structures, participation growth and everything I have learned from Bulleen and Perry Lakes.

But I would also be walking into a community with plenty to teach me.

As I write this, Cairns is only a possibility.

Five days ago, one Board decided my future with its organisation was over.

Tonight, another basketball conversation has already begun.

There is a lot of empty space between Perth and Melbourne.

Tomorrow, after I land back in Perth and hand over the keys, I will start crossing it.

I already know the kilometres will not care about titles.

The Nullarbor will not know what a CEO is.

Roadhouses will not ask who was right in a Board meeting.

I will fuel the car.

Drink water.

Drive.

Stop.

Sleep.

Repeat.

Behind me will be Bendat Basketball Centre.

The courts.

The office.

The Board meetings.

The accounting review.

The Xero plan.

The IT proposals.

The staff structure.

The referee pathway.

The venue meetings.

The domestic reform.

The summer competition.

The sponsors.

The programs I thought we could build.

The children already playing and the hundreds still waiting.

Ahead of me will be home.

A long drive gives you too much time to replay conversations.

I expect I will.

Even before I leave, I know there are things I would handle differently.

I could have slowed down in places.

Explained more.

Understood the politics earlier.

Chosen a different moment for a difficult conversation.

Leadership without self-reflection becomes arrogance.

But the more important question, the one I can answer before I even turn the key tomorrow, is whether I would change the principles behind the decisions.

I would not.

I would still insist that financial information be reliable.

I would still want accounts reconciled.

I would still want Association data controlled by the Association.

I would still examine commercial arrangements if I believed members could receive better value.

I would still want clear reporting lines.

I would still believe Boards should govern and executives should be allowed to execute within agreed authority.

I would still believe the CEO's responsibility was to the organisation as a whole.

Maybe that made me difficult at times.

Maybe it made me inconvenient.

But I did not move across Australia to occupy a chair.

I went there to lead.

For seventy-two days, that was what I believed I was doing.

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.