In 2019, the Exeter family experienced the tragic loss of Anthony – beloved husband to Kelly and amazing dad to Jaden and Mia. Kelly has always been open about the role basketball and Perth Redbacks as a club have played in helping them navigate life after this terrible loss. In the wide-ranging interview with Kelly below, it becomes clear that our sport and our club are having positive impacts on so many lives already. Would a new facility allow basketball and our club to do so much more for people in the local community? Read on and decide for yourself …
First of all, can you touch on your family’s history with basketball and the Perth Redbacks?
Ant started playing basketball around the age of 11 in Rockingham (where his family lived at the time) and played all his junior basketball there. While I never played – my sports were hockey, running and triathlon – I fell in love with the game at a young age, thanks to the Wildcats. Ant and I met at uni where we were both studying Human Movement (Sports Science). He’d recently started training with the Rockingham Flames SBL men’s team when we met, and I think he played his first ever SBL game the weekend before we got together. So, I missed that game but saw almost every one of the 303 games that followed. People used to think I was a pretty devoted girlfriend to prioritise watching him play over all the other things a uni student could be doing on a Friday and Saturday evening. But I loved basketball and loved watching him play, so it was zero hardship for me.
After winning the SBL league MVP in 2000, various things at Rockingham meant it was time for Ant to look for opportunities elsewhere. A chance encounter with Jamie Baker (Redbacks legend player) led to a conversation with CJ Jackson (then Redbacks head coach) and before long, Ant was a Perth Redback. I’ll never forget that first season with the Redbacks. He’d been there two minutes, but it felt like he’d been playing there his entire life because the people there embraced both of us so fully. The club really felt like family.
Once Ant stopped playing SBL, we got busy building businesses and having kids and lost our connection with basketball for a while. We reconnected with both basketball and Redbacks when our son Jaden started playing in a team in the Redbacks domestic competition at Loftus.
That early domestic team was a great example of the best things basketball has to offer. It was a group of school friends getting to play together. They were coached by three of the dads (Ant included) and, over the course of their first two seasons, progressed from this manic group of streetballers with hugely varying levels of skill to being a really functional team. In the competition, there was this one team – The Steelers – who we could never beat. But every time we played them, we got closer and closer. One of my favourite basketball memories is the Grand Final the boys played against The Steelers in their second season. We led from early on – something we’d never done against The Steelers. We were all freaking out, wondering, “Are we actually going to do it this time? Could you imagine doing it in a GF?” I’ll never forget the way Ant (normally cool, calm and ‘let’s remember this is just U10 basketball guys’) was frantically pacing the sidelines towards the end of that game as the clock ticked down. When the buzzer sounded to end the game with us in front, all of us parents were disproportionately pumped, and obviously, the boys were thrilled as well. Yes, it was fun because they won. But it was also fun because we were all such good friends (the boys and the parents) and the boys had worked so hard to improve, and they got rewarded for that hard work.
Not long after that, Jaden trialled for and made his first Redbacks State Champs team. He played State Champs for the Redbacks in December 2018. Ant only got to see one State Champs game due to a prior commitment, but at least he got to see Jaden play that one time in Redbacks colours. A month later, in January 2019, we were involved in a freak accident while driving down south, and Ant died two days later.
I’m sure a common question you get all the time is, ‘How on earth do you deal with a loss like that?’
Yes, it’s definitely the most commonly spoken and unspoken sentiment I get. Our family on both sides is very close. Ant and I have incredible friends. The kids have incredible friends, and their school was amazing when it all happened. The support network we had (and have to this day) is almost embarrassingly large, and we leaned heavily on every bit of that network in the early days. But I do need to also acknowledge how amazing the Redbacks and WA basketball community was in those early days.
Four members of the Redbacks Board and staff (three of whom we’d never met) attended Ant’s funeral. The Redbacks President Anthony Nixon, who owns a printing business, printed the funeral order of service and memorial bookmarks and refused to let us pay for them. He also insisted on printing double what I asked for because, “Kelly, there are going to be a lot more people there than 300.” (He was right. It seems there were over 800 people there, which was incredibly humbling for us.) The Perth Wildcats, who Ant trained with for a period in the 2000s, acknowledged him at their game the day after his funeral. This was a pretty special thing for all of us: the kids, me, and both our families.
Jaden trialled for his first-ever WABL team only two weeks after Ant died. After making a team, the coach asked me if I’d like to be the manager. I figured I’d need something to keep me busy and distracted in the coming months, so I said yes. And I’m so glad I did because it sure did keep me busy! Much busier than the coach suggested being a manager was (just washing some singlets and handing out drink bottles on game day is what I was told—ha!).
The first six to 12 months after Ant died, I was in survival mode – really only getting out of bed each day because I had two kids who needed to see me show up for life so they could do the same. Basketball was particularly massive for Jaden at this time. (Mia was only five, so she hadn’t started playing yet.) Jaden just lived for his Sunday WABL game – it really pulled him through every week in those early days, and I’m forever grateful he had that to get him through.
At the end of 2019, you joined the Perth Redbacks Board. How did that come about?
At the 2019 WABL Breakfast, Anthony Nixon called out for volunteers, and I put my hand up to say I could help with communications because that’s my wheelhouse. Long story short, the next minute, I found myself on the Board. This definitely raised some eyebrows in my family, who wondered if that was the best thing for me to do at the time. But it turned out to be exactly what I needed.
In what way?
Well, it kept me very busy and gave me something to focus on beyond how sad I was. So that was a pretty big thing. But beyond that, I was lucky to come on the Board at the same time as several other driven professionals who were extremely aligned in their desire to help the club elevate. Over my four years of being on the Board, we saw the club through the COVID years, navigated the transition from SBL to NBL1, grew the club’s finances from somewhere pretty dire to a state where we could afford paid staff, and grew the domestic and WABL programs to the point where both are at capacity. In short, we transitioned from being a mostly volunteer-run grassroots organisation to an almost fully staffed organisation. This is always a hard thing to do, but it had to happen in order for us to keep pace with other NBL1/WABL associations in Perth.
One of my favourite things in life is working with people I like to make something that’s already good even better. So even though working towards and achieving the above was time-consuming and involved a lot of stress, it was incredibly rewarding. Having something like that in your life goes a long way towards helping you get out of bed in the morning when things are hard.
On a family-unit level, most people wouldn’t realise I’m a pretty extreme introvert, and my favourite place in the world to be is at home. But my kids need people. The biggest ongoing challenge for me as a solo parent is giving them the opportunities they need to be with people while protecting my own energy levels (because when those get low, things go south pretty quickly). For this reason, the kids and I spend a lot of time at the club, whether it’s at domestic, at WABL game days at Vic Park, or at NBL1 games. The kids can disappear and roam and just be with their friends, and I know they’re safe and happy. Meanwhile, I can just watch whatever game is on, and if I find myself in conversation with someone, it would be about basketball, which I’m happy to talk about all day, every day. So, outside of home, the club was the easiest environment for me to be in five years ago. And still is now.
You’ve mentioned before that you’ve heard this same sentiment from others?
That the club is a much-needed safe space for them? Yes, I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve told me that basketball and being in the Redbacks environment is a haven for them. I’ve had coaches tell me how much they look forward to the training sessions and games they have with their teams as it’s a positive break from the stress and challenges in their everyday life. I’ve managed kids who are having big struggles at school or home, and seen how basketball gives them a few hours each week to have some fun and just be. Parents who’ve come from other clubs have told me what a welcoming and genuinely family-focused environment we provide. And can I say, we manage to do all this without a facility to call home!
Thank you for the nice segue! Let’s talk about facility and courts. Because I recently heard you tell someone that our court situation has made you cry about ten times this year.
Ha. Yes, it has. And that’s just this year.
When I went on the Redbacks Board, I was full of ideas of all the things Redbacks could be doing better. Most of these ideas involved having access to courts at certain venues and certain times of the day. So I look back and cringe at my arrogance and ignorance of just how hard things were from a court-availability point of view. I didn’t realise that there wasn’t a single court we used that we had control over and knew would always be available to us. Every court we used, we had to hire. And it wasn’t a matter of telling a facility, “Lock us in for these courts every Saturday from 8am to 6pm from now until 2030”. We had to keep re-hiring the same courts we were using, over and over. And every so often, if a facility manager changed, or another sport swooped in, or there was a tiny miscommunication somewhere, a court we’d had access to for ages would suddenly not be available to us.
There are a LOT of court hours involved in:
- Allowing our two NBL1 teams to train professionally
- Giving our 33 WABL teams the 90-minute weekly training session they need to develop appropriately and be competitive
- Running a domestic competition that has 220 teams
- Giving those 220 teams access to courts for training
- Running entry-level programs like Aussie Hoops.
The above are the absolute minimum things we need to offer as an association, and the stress and time involved in securing the courts for them are significant. And that’s before we can do any of the ‘nice to haves’, like extra training sessions for our Championship Division WABL teams or running programs to develop our emerging and talented athletes.
Basketball is absolutely booming right now. All associations in Perth are meeting this demand by spilling out of their home facility into any courts they can find elsewhere. But we’re the only association in Perth that doesn’t have a home facility to spill out of.
After I stepped off the Redbacks Board at the end of last year, I took on the WABL Administrator role. Anything I do, I want to do it really, really well. So I’m not ashamed to say it has made me cry with frustration and embarrassment every time a court access issue makes us look unprofessional. Things like a team rocking up to a training venue, not being able to get in because the gates are locked, and me not being able to do anything about it because I can’t get hold of the facility manager … so they have to miss the session. Or when we get one day’s notice that a court isn’t available for a high-level program we’re running, and I have to scramble for a replacement court and the email the parents and the coach that the venue has changed to somewhere that’s not close to the original venue … for a session that’s at 6.30am … It also does upset me when a kid who made a WABL team for us can’t take that coveted, hard-won spot because their training venue/time (which can’t be confirmed until all the teams are finalised and the scheduling nightmare of getting 33 WABL teams on a training court can be done) means their parents just can’t get them there because of work commitments or the commitments of other kids in the family. Our WABL training venues are Melville SHS in the south, HBF Stadium in the north, Cannington Leisureplex in the east … and literally everywhere in between. As a parent of two WABL-playing kids myself, I’ve experienced the ongoing stress and logistical challenges of getting two children to different venues for WABL training on the same night and it’s really hard.
And that’s just WABL (representative basketball). I can’t tell you the number of emails we get from parents looking to get their kids into a domestic (anyone can play) basketball team who we’re unable to help because all our domestic clubs are at capacity. It’s depressing to me that when my kids wanted to start playing basketball, there was no barrier to them purely because of the timing of when they started. But it’s getting to the point where you need to put your child on a waiting list for a basketball club when they’re born to assure them they’ll have a spot waiting by the time they’re old enough to play.
Look, I could go on and on. And I don’t want to act like we’re the only WA basketball association that has staff and volunteers feeling crushed from the strain of trying to meet overwhelming demand. But as I’ve said, we’re the only one without a home facility. We’re doing so much with what we do have access to. Our CEO Ryan Lenegan just won NBL1 Executive of the Year at the recent Basketball WA awards. Our President Anthony Nixon won BWA Volunteer of the Year. We have so many amazing people in our organisation doing amazing things. And we have the potential to do so much more.
In June, the Redbacks launched a campaign for a new 12-court stadium for Perth via a petition to the WA Government. Who will benefit from this stadium?
Well obviously, our club and our community will benefit. We’ll finally have a home to operate out of. We’ll have a large number of courts in one location which will reduce stress and burnout for our staff and volunteers (by putting the majority of what we do in one place rather than 30 places). It will reduce stress and logistical challenges for our families who are currently driving all over Perth to give their kids access to the things we offer. It will increase the number of people we can serve in our local community. It will benefit basketball in WA in general by giving organisations like the Perth Wildcats and Basketball WA another large facility where they can run things like the Wildcats Academy and State Performance/Development Programs. It will give Perth a large, world-class indoor court facility to hold major events like National Championships. It will benefit other indoor sports, especially volleyball and the Reds Volleyball Club, which is experiencing all the same challenges we are. It will take pressure off smaller local facilities that are caught in a tug-of-war between all the sports wanting the court space they have to offer. It will benefit the local community hugely as the parcel of land we’ve highlighted to the Government is in the same area where they want to build more housing. More housing means more families. Those families will need a place to go and play and belong.
The petition is in its final days, we need 10,000 signatures, and we’re not quite there yet. Do you have any parting words for anyone who hasn’t signed it yet?
If you have $100 million in the bank that you’d like to donate to the Perth Redbacks so we can buy the land and build the facility we need … please, give our CEO Ryan a call! If you don’t have $100 million in the bank but you live in WA, your signature and the signature of every person in your family is the equivalent of that.
If you’ve read this far, and you believe in the power of community sport to make lives better, please give us one more minute of your time to sign the petition. It’s so very important that we reach our goal of 10,000.
If you’ve signed it already, please ask just one other person from WA to sign.
If you’re still not sure about signing, hopefully the below will make you feel more comfortable.
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Signing the petition
- Involves entering your name, address, phone number and email address into an online form. It takes less than a minute.
- Details are entered on the State Government website and go to the State Government only.
- Perth Redbacks gets no access to the details in the petition, only the government does.
- Anyone who is a resident of WA and believes in the power of community sport to make life better can sign the petition. This includes children.
- The petition closes at 11.30pm on Sunday 11 August.
- Perth Basketball Association, Perth Reds Volleyball Association and the WA indoor sport community thank you for your support.