[Steph - Lindsay Gaze Outstanding Sports Leadership Award]
Steph Whatley:
It's so hard to just put into words, but it's the most freeing sport. You can dribble the ball, shoot the ball, pass the ball, anything you want to do. It's like the most creative game, which I really enjoy about it the most. That's what basketball means to me.
I actually started playing VJ, well... domestic basketball at under 12s. And during my top age 14s year is when I experienced a not so great coach who made me actually hate the game. Just yelling and screaming and only caring about winning rather than like developing and what you should, I believe, a coach should be doing. And then I just said, ‘No, this is not for me’. So, I took two years off. I quit everything about basketball. And then I moved to Western Heights and someone was like, ‘Hey, why don't you try coaching?’ So, that's how I started. Just jumped right in.
I'm currently coaching the under 12s ‘1’ girls at Geelong United and I'm also the development coach for the under 16 girls Victoria state team. I also just got an appointment as the development coach for the NBL1 women's team for Geelong United. So that's something else I'm doing.
Kaleb Sclater is my mentor coach. He's the head coach for our specialist basketball program here at Western Heights. He is also the head coach for the NBL1 women's Melbourne Tigers team. Having a mentor as a coach is so important because as a coach you're just thrown in. You're given a team and just like, ‘Alright, take care of them’. And you're like, ‘Okay, what? What do I do?’ Like you’re coaching on the sidelines and then it's just like, ‘Now what do I do?’
Having Kaleb always here with me, giving me drills to teach my under 12s, telling me what to say, what not to say, or like, how to say it to different age groups. That's like what he's been really helping me with right now. And even now, as I graduated, he's still checking in on me, texting me, saying like, ‘How did your under 12s go?’ ‘What are you doing at training?’ ‘If you don't know what to do, here are some drills’. Just like making sure that I'm staying on the right track with my coaching pathway.
I wouldn't say there's too much of a difference between being a good leader and being a good coach. It's pretty much just always listening. I guess the difference between being a good coach is that you kind of have to stay like at least two steps ahead than the players. What I found is that as I got more experience and more exposure to coaching, you can see the mistake before the mistake is going to happen, whereas the players can’t. Just seeing like those little things that you can kind of see before it happens, I think makes a better coach than just a good coach. So that's what I keep trying to like, see, like I try to scan the floor before it's happened. And I'm like, ‘Okay, we need to pick this up soon’ because otherwise it's just not going to go our way.
Coaching long term... I feel like my main dream right now is to be the head coach of the NBL1 women's team at Geelong United. Working with the NBL1 has just like always really inspired me to like, ‘Okay, that's where I want to be’. That's like... my dream. But my biggest dream so far is just going to the COE and being able to coach like the best of the best in Australia. That would be so awesome to experience. Like, I'm nowhere near that level right now but just always working towards doing all these tournaments through Basketball Vic, through Geelong United. Just always slowly making my way up. So that's, that's my biggest dream. But right now my smaller but still big dream is the NBL1 head coach.
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Authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.
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Updated