An Aussie Confession

Australian Volleyball by Nathan Roberts

The most important sporting memory of my life had nothing to do with my professional Volleyball career with the Australian National Team or with one of the various club teams I have played with in Europe.

Now that I think about it, it did not even have to do with watching a particular match or sport in particular, it was more about a concept, and that concept was the Olympic Games. I was 6 years old in 1992 watching the opening ceremony of the Barcelona Olympic games. Leading up to the ceremony I had asked my parents to explain to me what the Olympics were. It was explained to me that in essence the Olympic Games comprised all the best athletes in the World gathered together for 2 weeks to compete in around 30 different disciplines to see who is the best in the world for heir particular discipline. I made my mind up then and there; when I grew up I wanted to compete in an Olympics.

This however raised a couple of issues, I grew up like any normal Australian kid, re-enacting kicking the winning goal in the Australian Football Grand Final (AFL), hitting the winning runs to win the Cricket World Cup or even scoring the winning try in the Rugby Union or Rugby League World Cup. Trouble is, you don’t see any of those sports at the Olympics.

So my thoughts of Olympic gory were on the backburner till I stumbled across the sport of Indoor Volleyball in High School.

Volleyball in Australia is interesting in that it is quite a popular sport within High Schools; we have a national tournament at the end of each year involving hundreds of different schools and thousands of children, I believe it is the largest of it’s kind in the southern hemisphere for any sport.

However as soon as High School is finished there are a very large percentage of people who will never play organized Volleyball again. In Australia we have no professional Volleyball League, we have no College sports and at this point in time we don’t even have a full time Women’s National Team program. (The full time program was cut after the team did not qualify for the Athens Olympics).

So as you can see Volleyball is very limited in Australia. Some lucky people are given scholarships to the Australian Institute of Sport at high school or early post High School age to train with the National Youth Teams on a full time basis in order to eventually plight their trade overseas and force their way into the Australian Men’s national team. (However this is maybe only 3-4 people per year…. and only applies to Men as we don’t have a full time Women’s Indoor program).

The other option is to possibly go to the US on scholarship, however I’m sure as some other readers can back me up, getting a scholarship to a University is easier said than done. Even if you are a good player and obtain a full time scholarship there are still airfares, food and I’m sure other expenses associated with this, which are simply out of some family’s capabilities.

However we have seen success with this with a number of players in Canada and probably most famously Paul Carroll who had a great career in Pepperdine and was I believe the NCAA MVP one year.

We give up a lot, good Australian players will leave home at about 16 years old to train full time with the program, and we leave the country at a bout 19-20 years old to go and play In Europe. The national team players spend up to 10 months of the year outside of Australia (in 2007) I spent around 30 days in Australia in total, and about 5 with my family) We don’t have the resources to pay National Team players so therefore if some players don’t find contracts in Europe they may not have any source of income for an extended period of time. In many ways it is a tough gig.

So far I’ve talked mainly about the difficulties faced within our sport in Australia. There are some positives to be taken from this. Our Volleyball community although small is very passionate. Everybody knows a lot of different Volleyballers from al over the country and they keep a close eye out on how our National Teams are going and even how our club seasons are going. As a mass but completely correct generalization, the community as a whole is extremely friendly. Maybe it is due to Volleyball not being within the top 20 or so sports in Australia, but everybody is great. Nearly all my best friends are Volleyballers all around the country.

So getting back to the original part about wanting to be an Olympian, it’s a tough ask, we play in the Asian zone with over 50 different countries, only 1 of them gets the Olympic Ticket, we play against countries such as Japan, Korea, China and Iran which have 100’s of professional volleyballers to choose from, where as we have about 15-20 depending on the year.

This year is especially big; we have the Olympic Qualifications in Japan in June. Qualification is a must for our team, we aren’t sure if we will have a Men’s program after this year, it seems like qualification may be the deciding factor, but I remain confident. I can vouch for everyone in my team that just like me the most important thing for them in their career is to get to an Olympic games, it is what unites our team year in and year out.

Now all we can do is work as hard as we can for the next couple of months, leave it all on the floor in Japan and grab that all important ticket to London.

***

Special thanks to volleyballphotos.co.uk/ for allowing us to use their pictures of Nathan Roberts!