Abstract
The four stories told here reflect how the journeys of all eight AFL participants to the AFL began in humble surroundings where they developed the fundamentals of their footy skills and ability up until around the age of 12. It also seems that during what Côté and colleagues (see Côté and Hay 2002) refer to as the sampling phase in the DMSP they developed personal qualities and strong values that enabled them to deal with a wide range of challenges as they moved into different ways of training and playing from the ages of 13–15 as they approached making it to the AFL. Each of these four stories tells us of resilience in dealing with very significant challenges and suggests the role that mentors and life learning in their families and communities played in this. These moves included moving back and forth between the Northern Territory and Victoria or South Australia at the age of 12, completing year 12 (final year of secondary schooling) over 30,000 km from home while playing professional footy, or being thrust into the demands of AFL football as a teenager in a huge city far from home and crying every night due to loneliness and separation from family and community.
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Light, R., Evans, J.R. (2018). Part II Discussion. In: Stories of Indigenous Success in Australian Sport. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66450-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66450-7_9
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