S1E91 · Melissa Maizels: Embracing the journey

Hey team, welcome to another episode of the Virtus Performance Podcast. What a beautiful sunny day it is here in Melbourne. The sun's out, the birds are singing, all of those kind of things. Today's episode, episode 91, and actually before I get stuck into today's guest, I would like to thank all of you guys for listening, for getting back on the Virtus Podcast bandwagon. I know we were a little MIA for six months or so, but we are back at least till the end of the year. So we'll be throwing some quality guests and hopefully quality conversations your way over the next two, three months.

So it's very, very exciting. Much like today's guest, how's that for a segue, we have Melissa Maizels. Mal is, I first met Mal when she joined up and inquired about Virtus a little while ago. And she's someone who is a, what you call a type A high achiever. She's always the most, what word I'm looking for, most jovial person in the room. She brings big smiles in every time she walked into the gym and she's someone who I love working with. She's a high level soccer player. She's played the W league, the women's soccer league for the last five seasons.

And now she's back in Melbourne after a few stints in state that we spoke about. And she's gotten stuck into running and growing her business and hopefully getting another contract for the W league season that is coming up over the next couple of months. So we had a chat about her journey, why she, why soccer is her thing with both work and sport. And we had a big chat about the journey along the way and how important process and embracing every moment is and not just worrying about the destination. So let me get straight into the podcast.

Thank you, Mal, for coming on today. I know I've waffled a little bit for the last couple of minutes, but this one is definitely worth a listen. My personal and business goal is to be just a little bit better every day. I believe everyone, especially normal people have a story to tell. The Virtus podcast exists to help us all find small ways of consistent improvement by discussing the journey experiences of each of our guests. Mal, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. How's your day been? It's been good. It's been positive. It's felt like it's heading in the right direction.

So sun's out. And you've trained today already. I have. Yes. I've been into Virtus, done my rehab and my movement prep and everything. So I'm feeling good. It's exciting. Good question for you. Okay. We'll get you out of bed in the morning. Passion for everything. Do elaborate. Well, wow. Good question. Got me. Yeah. Passion. Passion for friendships, relationships. Passion in my sport. Obviously, I play soccer. It took 90 seconds for you to talk about soccer. And you're also vegan. Do you want to just let that out now? No. I was going to hold on to that the whole time.

Keep talking about passion. I mean, yeah. It's the way that I like to think that I can approach my life in every way. I feel like if I'm going to do something, I want to do it right. And intrinsically, I'm more motivated to do something properly and really invest in it if I've got a passion for whatever I'm pursuing. Have you always been a passionate person? Absolutely. What's your earliest memory of being passionate about something and loving something? Absolutely the first time I played soccer. I was 10 years old when I started playing and I could not get enough.

I had to play with my friends. It was me who asked my dad if I could join the local club at 10. And yeah, since I started playing, anyone who knows me knows that since I started playing, I've wanted to play for my country. I told my dad one day I'd be in Matilda and I'm still on that journey. So the dream kind of lives on. But yeah, passion for football has definitely always been there and led me to get my first tattoo when I was 18. Like all new adults do, I turned 18 and got the word passion tattooed on me.

Yes I did. There you go. That might be the first time that the answer to that question has been a tattoo. So good from you. You've also got be kind on your hand. I do. Yes. Why? Do you need a reminder? No, I don't. I feel like obviously people have different perceptions of tattoos and I just feel like they're an expression of each individual and I like to express myself and I just think you need to approach everything in life with an intention to be kind. Awesome. I love that. Talk me through, and obviously this

is a big question, but talk me through the journey from a 10 year old who's bugging her dad to play soccer to the person you are now. It has been a long and very, very winding journey to the 26 year old that I am currently, but very successful in its own respect. I haven't quite reached that pinnacle, that end goal of being a Matilda quite yet, but- Yet, important. Yet, very important. But yeah, I've become rather more enlightened lately around the fact that it is about the journey and really just trying to live in each moment.

It sounds cliche, but as cliche as it is, it's true. We do need to live in the now and I've been really enjoying my past probably 12 months where I've matured into that mindset and realised that football isn't always going to be being fit to play every game of every season. You're going to get injured and there's going to be bumps in the road and obviously my journey hasn't been linear towards my playing goal. I've ended up doing a lot more coaching than I thought I would and I've ended up developing my passion for coaching. That's grown me as a footballer first and foremost, but big time that's grown me as a person.

It's one thing to manage your own career and coach yourself effectively, but it's a whole other ballpark to be managing individuals and being the facilitator in their career and their reaching of their goals. Yeah. It's a bit of a shift. Yeah, really big shift and I've really enjoyed that. I've battled quite a lot with injury in the past 24 months, which has been completely obviously unexpected. No one expects to get injured, but it just forces you to deal with things that you otherwise wouldn't have thought about or prepared yourself for. So that shift was kind of forced upon you.

Yeah, definitely. I have always coached. I've coached for 10 years now, but it was probably 18 months ago that I returned home from my fourth W League season in Perth and decided to hang up the coaching boots. I was done. I was just going to focus on playing. It was within a month of declaring that to my mum that I ended up meeting my now business partner and investing in a soccer academy. So you went from not wanting to coach to I'm going to just throw everything at coaching for a bit. Pretty much, yeah. And that was pre-injury.

So that was just the right place at the right time, the right person, the right connection. It's funny how that happens. That's cool. You talk like someone that hasn't always had this kind of wide angle view of life and soccer and business and everything else. Was young male tunnel vision into football, football, football? One hundred percent. Talk me through why you differ now, and obviously injuries played a big part of that and you kind of forced into it, but what's that transition from tunnel vision to wide angle kind of taught you? I think it's really important to keep an open mindset and work on being adaptable, but they kind of need to work in harmony together.

You can be open minded but not have the ability to actually change course or pursue other areas with an actual purpose or intention to be effective in those areas. So if you can't actually do it, there's no point really having the intention of doing anything. But then again, you could be as adaptable as you want, but if you're closed minded and got your blinders on, you're not going to be open to new experiences. So you're never going to actually realise your full potential. So I think just having that kind of, I won't say perfect, but ideal marriage between adaptability and open mindedness to really let yourself become whatever you're kind of, the universe wants you to become I guess.

How old are you now? I'm 26. I knew that, I was just checking for the podcast. But how would 17 year old Mel go being coached by 26 year old Mel? Great question. It's been a while, so it's good I've still got it a little bit. Wow. Yeah, I think I'd like to think she'd be okay. No, I honestly in terms of my coaching, my coaching style, I just, I place just a lot of emphasis on building, establishing and building relationships with my players. That's just so important. I can have all the technical knowledge in the world, which I absolutely do not.

I thought you were going to say you did. Bit of head wobble. No, I am scratching the surface. I do, you know, I back myself and I know the game. I've been in amongst the game for 16 years. I'm a student of the game. I watch football. I live and breathe it. But everyone's always learning and I know that I have just barely scratched the surface in terms of my football knowledge. But where I know I've found my niche is in my ability to engage players and really make them feel valued. I won't say that I had coaches who made me feel this way, but inadvertently, that's what I'm saying.

But you know, the worst thing as a player is to have a coach make you feel afraid to make mistakes. That is a surefire way for a player to never reach their potential. Definitely. And that has got to be true across the board, not just sport. That's in fitness, in teaching. Every industry that has a teacher and a learner, if your learner feels like they're going to make a mistake, they're not going to try. Every time we make a mistake, we highlight a gap or an area where we can learn and grow into. And that is an opportunity in itself.

If you don't actually fuck up every now and again, you're never going to break through those ceilings that you can set for yourself. That's it. And in saying that, the absolute best way for anyone to learn is through teaching themselves through making mistakes. You've never seen a principal stick better than if a player tries something in a game and gets skinned, loses the ball, and they concede a goal. Me telling a player 10 times to do something versus them making a mistake and feeling it. When the learner feels the mistake, that's when the shift, the change is made.

That's when the opportunity for growth is. And when a mistake happens, if there is something at stake, then there's a whole lot more reason to make sure it doesn't happen again. Absolutely. And that all contributes to that learning mechanism. So for me as a coach, I just really, really pride myself on ensuring my players have the confidence to make mistakes. What's you becoming more of a coach done to you as a player? Another good question. I start writing down every time you say good questions. Thanks for pumping my tyres. Thanks for making me feel valued. I'm just going to throw questions out there.

I don't care if I make a mistake. Building confidence, yeah. So everyone listening, go home and fuck something up. You'll learn. I think, I mean, obviously the tactical side of it has helped a lot. It all feeds itself. The more I play, the better. And see, you know, being a goalkeeper, I see the whole game in front of me. So the more I play, the better tactically aware I am as a coach. Vice versa, the more I coach, the more tactically aware as a player. So that all feeds itself. I guess communication as well is so important in the way that I communicate with my players.

I like to make sure that everything I say is concise and makes sense. I don't want to be out there just screaming for the sake of it. As a player or a coach, I want to make sure that all my players know exactly what instruction I'm delivering in minimal amount of words, clear and concise so that they can focus on their jobs on the field. So I guess that's helped. I guess if you can say something in 10 words rather than saying it in 30, you're going to get, you know, you minimize the chance for the message to get lost in the middle.

So it's such an important thing for any coaches or even any athletes out there is to just get the message out or get the message in, depending on which side of the coin you're on. And if you're trying to communicate something back the other way, the whole point of communication is to convey a message and hopefully change behaviour for the positive. And if we can do that, then everybody wins. Absolutely. So talk me through your W-League career and the last four years and moving into state and what that did to, or how that shaped you as a person, but also as a player.

And tell me about the experience. I haven't really spoken to anyone but really close friends about this portion of my life and the actual experiences about it. I've spoken in interviews and stuff about how it was to move into state and go pursue my dreams and play W-League, but only those who are really close to me have actually heard this side and honestly... If you're not good friends with Mel, stop listening now. Honestly like, it was shit. I'm like, would I go back and change it? No. You've never turned down a W-League contract. But... It's taken pretty much everything out of me.

I've loved every season, but I just have really struggled with creating a life, a happy life. I'm a happy person and anyone who asks me knows that, but when you have to move your life into state every six months, five years in a row... Yeah, that's rough. It's just exhausting and it has made it almost impossible to have a relationship. It's made it difficult to maintain friendships. It's made it hard to leave family and it's been near impossible to create a life outside of football for myself, which is something that the Professional Football Association are working really hard on, supporting everyone in that space, to create a life for themselves now, preparing for life after football.

But that has been near impossible. So while I love my friends and obviously I love my family, you know that those good friends that you have are gonna remain, they're gonna stay, regardless of anything. You know your family's always gonna be there. The two real parts of my life that have affected me have been lack of career direction, lack of sustained income, and inability to develop any sort of a romantic relationship with anyone. That's just been really tough. Especially through the period of your life that it was, being early 20s and mid-20s. It's kind of the time where those three things tend to start being created for most people.

So you almost put yourself behind the eight ball because you want to chase that dream. But I guess, on the other hand, to chase that dream and to do those things you want to do, it's a sacrifice that you had to make, but you obviously didn't have a full view of what it was gonna be like until you actually lived it, right? Must have been a lonely place at times. Yeah, it's super lonely. Any professional athlete will tell you that. Does it give you a newfound appreciation for, obviously, any soccer fan, football fan, any sports fan will hear about athletes moving all the time, and it's not something that you can really comprehend unless you've lived it.

But does it give you a newfound appreciation for that side of the industry? Yeah, big time. It puts a lot of things in perspective. It's just a journey and there's so many people out there who might be in loving relationships and would kill to be a professional athlete. Whereas I'm over here in a professional environment training every day and flying to state representing a professional club and I'd kill for a relationship. It's a nice little perspective play in the fact that everyone always thinks the grass is greener. People look at professional athletes and go, "They've got it made," but everyone goes through shit.

Everyone has the things that they don't have that they want and the things they're working towards. Obviously, going through that stuff, and you mentioned early on about the journey, that's been able to mold you to appreciate what you do have. And now being back in your home state, having what I would say from the outside looking in is pretty solid career direction now with coaching and probably a newfound appreciation for playing. Is that fair? Oh, definitely. Yeah. How are you going balancing all of those different things while still trying to reach that goal that you said to your dad when you were 10?

Things have become a lot clearer of late. Last season, my W-League season wasn't as successful as I'd have liked. I got injured three days into pre-season and didn't play a game all season, so that was probably my hardest season yet. And when I say hardest, I mean physically, emotionally, mentally. Yeah, if I'm going to be candid, I was not in a good place. I was isolated, away from home. I did see someone. I was depressed, which is not something that a lot of people know. That was really confronting for me because I always like to be everyone's ball of energy and positive outlook.

Just to go through that period was really confronting. And coming home, I really shifted my value of stability and home and decided that I was desperate to stay here this season. Awesome. I'm hoping that comes to fruition. That still involves me working hard and pursuing a contract with a Melbourne club, but it's all in front of me. If the universe wants me to stay in Melbourne and play W-League, then that's what the universe will give me. It's exciting. It's all ahead of you. The first step of that journey is tomorrow, right? And you've got a whole heap of cool people in your corner that want to see you succeed.

And I guess now that you've got a little bit more balance around the rest of your life, you can put not all of your energy, because other energy has got to go towards the business stuff as well, but as much of your energy as you want into that stuff, which is exciting. And you've got the opportunity now, having gone through all the hard stuff, is to just enjoy being a player. Which I'm craving. I'm craving just being healthy, fit, being on the park, training with my mates and working hard, feeling like an athlete again, but

then also at the same time being able to see my friends daily, see my family at least weekly, maintain my business, which I absolutely love, coaching all my kids. So it would be the dream. Part of me feels like I deserve a break, but then, you know, the other part of me just knows that what will be, will be and just let it happen. From my outside looking in, you've got, and being able to see, approach you as an athlete, coach athlete relationship, it's been really cool to see that, that steely resolve that you've got.

You've got that determination that not a lot of people have around chasing a thing and whether you're ticking all of the boxes that you want to tick or not, you're going to be able to look back on this transition, this part of your life and be like, "I did a pretty good job." So pat on the back for all the things you haven't done yet. But it's exciting. And no doubt, you'll come into this new team and I guess probably be able to put your arm around some of the girls that aren't from this part of the world and be able to approach it from a whole different perspective than you would have in the past.

Yeah, I've been there. I've been there. I've lived away from home, so I know the feeling and I know the isolation that has the potential to ensue. So I just need to make sure I provide that support to them and that friendship and camaraderie. Tell me about the business. My love. Tell me how it started first, first of all. Started with a coffee. Yep. All the best ones do. So started with, yeah, we started with, did you start with a coffee? Yep. There you go. Yeah. Well, yeah, pretty much. Started with a game of golf and then coffee followed.

So mine started with my mum cycling. Oh, hello. With a mate of my business partner, Nathan, chatting to him over, get this, a coffee after their cycling session that morning. And yeah, just told her cycling buddy about me being a soccer player. He basically said, "I've got a mate, Nathan. He's an incredible coach. He has a business. Does she want a job?" Mum came home and she said, "Mel, I've teed up. You've got a job. Coaching." And I said, "Mum, I don't want a bar. Don't want a bar of it. Don't want to coach." This was that phase.

And then three weeks later I was broke and I needed to have a bar. So I gave Nathan a call. We called up for a coffee and I got to meet his son who's incredible. He's got cerebral palsy and he's an absolute star. One of the most intelligent kids I've ever met. That's awesome. And I fell in love with the man. He's so incredible. And same football philosophy, same life philosophy and it was done. So I just started coaching for him. How long ago was this? This was about April, May last year. And yeah, spent a month or two coaching for him.

Had some ideas about what we could do to grow. I put those together in a document and presented them to him. I have no business knowledge whatsoever and no business background study or anything. I did year 11 business studies. That's it. So I just chucked together a little proposal for him and he liked it and he let me invest. So cut to today. We're about 18 months in. We've got a couple of other business partners now who all bring something incredible to the table. And together we just make a good team. And I get to say that every morning I get to wake up and teach kids how to play soccer.

That's awesome. That's all I care about. If I can pay rent and buy groceries and do it by teaching kids how to play soccer and have a kick, I'll like absolute dream. Is it surreal to look back at when things weren't going well and you were having a rough time that this is now your life? You're kind of chalking cheese a little bit. It's funny because last season when I was in that kind of dark little spot, I was six, seven, eight months into owning the business and I was running the business remotely. The guys were obviously doing a lot of the heavy lifting back home in terms of coaching and stuff.

And we employ coaches obviously, but operations and obviously liaising with parents and organising everything. I was doing remotely from Canberra and it was tough. I felt really disconnected and the sole source of my depression was the fact that I was in Canberra and wasn't able to fully execute the operations of my business, yet whilst being in Canberra, I was injured. So I was in Canberra to play football and not do the business, but I wasn't playing football. So why was I there? And that's why I was in such a shit place because I was effectively not contributing to the world for a little period of time and that's what I couldn't grapple and couldn't really deal with.

I almost felt like I had no purpose. Someone that gets out of bed for passion, that's not a nice place to be. You've obviously been able to come home and dive straight into the business. How important has that ability to connect with everyone face to face, day to day? No amount of emails, no phone calls, even FaceTime, it doesn't do it justice. Couldn't wait to get back and when I did, I just got so stuck into the business and just reconnecting with all the parents and getting down to the sessions and coaching the kids and they all missed me and I missed them.

Our whole lives are just based on interpersonal connections, they just are. Not having that is just depleting. You can't make a proper connection with someone. It's just almost impossible to develop any type of real relationship trust because all of that just comes through body language and emotion and the way that people respond and I just am very big on being able to create proper connections with people so being able to come home and do that was really important to me. It's really cool. Where do you want to take Absolute Soccer? What's the big, hairy, audacious goal that you guys have?

Is it just to teach soccer to as many people as possible? No, we've got goals. Fill me in. Whoa. Fill me in. Without giving away any trade secrets of course. It's not that anyone would have thought of it but my vision for Absolute Soccer is to have a facility in Mornington unlike any other facility. A hub for kids to play soccer all year round without any risk of not being able to play because of pitch or pitch condition or anything like that. I want a hub with an all-weather synthetic facility just so I can teach kids how to play soccer.

That's what it comes back to. It literally is. We've been struggling lately to find venues. It's hard because I understand schools and clubs want to keep their venues preserved for their teams and I totally get that and I respect it. I'm not a club. We're an individual provider. We're a third-party provider. People may look at us and go, "Oh, maybe they just want to make money." They're so not that. I barely make rent. It's a byproduct. Like I said, the fact that I can pay my rent by teaching kids how to play soccer is all I care about.

For me, all I want is to be able to do that all year round on my own terms, in my own hours, just so we can build football in this region. I've got high-performing kids who, to have access to a facility four days a week and train four days a week, are driving minimum 45 minutes each way to go and train. That's a 10- or 11-year-old doing that. I just want to be able to give the kids of the region access to high-quality coaching. That's it. That's all I want. That's the big, audacious, hairy goal. It'll come in years, maybe, but it'll come.

It'll come. That's what we're working towards. Having that goal there is what keeps us taking over. It keeps us going. It keeps us trying to push the envelope and try to grow and develop and get more people involved. That's cool. It's exciting. Your big, hairy, audacious goal just comes back to your simple goal of being able to teach people to play soccer. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that, which is cool. You're not only an absolute soccer, but also local club. Fill me in. Fill us in. Great. Great club. Mount Martha Soccer Club.

I came on board as technical director this year. That was a voluntary role. I'll probably link your interview, I reckon. Pump you up. They are awesome. Club's five years old, so very young. We've got about just over 400 kids playing soccer, which is incredible. Just this year we've got access to our new facility in Mornington. Again, it's grass, so it's brand new. There's issues around making sure that we preserve that for the future. If we wear it out in the first six months, it's not going to exist in years' time. Understandably, we can't really jump on there every day.

Otherwise, I'd love to. Great club. Club built around family culture, community culture, inclusivity, and making sure that every player that wants to play can come and play, which effectively aligns perfectly with my business. Our catchphrase, if you will, or whatever our slogan is, absolute soccer is named absolute because it's for absolutely every kid. Absolutely every child deserves the opportunity to be coached by the highest quality coaches. Mount Martha harnessed the exact same philosophy, is it? Absolutely every child. So I made it really easy to get involved with it. Easy. It was a no brainer. It was a coffee.

It was a coffee. It's always coffee. It's always coffee. This coffee is so good. And it was just a yes. It was a go away and think about it, but it was a get in the car and call them straight away. Yes. So, absolute pleasure to be involved and hopefully be involved in years to come and really want to work on coach development. I think that's really important. Getting young kids involved in coaching, getting parents involved in coaching, and upskilling people and getting the coaches again in this region. So I'm not all about teaching the kids how to play soccer.

If I can teach coaches how to coach soccer, then... You get to impact so many more people. The impact grows exponentially. Yeah, it's huge. So yeah. Awesome. One last thing for you. Okay. It doesn't have to be a specific age, but if you could impart some wisdom or advice that you've learned over the journey so far to a younger you or a younger soccer player or a younger person, what would it be? I would love to be able to go back and shift my focus to my journey, not my destination. It has just hit me like a ton of bricks in the last probably two months that it's all about journey.

Life is all about journey and if I am so closed-minded and just focused solely on where I want to go, I'm never going to be happy. I used to have performance issues with football where I would be playing a game of soccer and I would be thinking about who's on the sideline watching me. Yeah. I would be thinking about what would happen if I did this, what would happen if I made this save, copped this goal, what would they think of me? What happens at the end of this game if I come off with a clean sheet, having conceded 10 goals?

And that is so outcome-driven, that mentality that I used to be in the moment and not be focused at all on what I was doing. I can see the stupidest goals. And I feel like that's true to life. If I'm too worried about what people think of me and what the end goal or the end outcome is going to feel like or be like or look like if I do this, that or the other, then I'm not actually thinking about what I'm currently doing. And it comes back to just being as present as possible and you hear people throw that around like there's no fucking tomorrow these days.

They just love it. But whether or not they actually live by it is their prerogative. But the more people throwing it around, great, the better, if it can just evoke something in someone. But these past two months, I've just become so enlightened to the fact that if I can just do life every day, just wake up and do life and be awesome and try to be kind and live a life where I can serve others and have positive little impacts on people throughout the day and smile when I walk past that weird-looking man in the supermarket.

Just little things like that and just be a good human every day. And then when I go on the soccer field, I can apply the same philosophy of just making this safe for this shot. If you enjoy it and focus on the way you are now, it's fun. Oh, it's so much more fun. Life honestly gains so much more clarity and you just realize how awesome life is, even when shit things are happening. But when you live like that, when shit things are happening, you kind of understand, "Okay, this is part of the process. What's this trying to teach me?

What opportunities is this going to give me?" And it gives you a whole new perspective of how to actually act and be good. Because where you are and what you're doing is more important than anything else. And as soon as we start to worry about things that haven't happened yet or things that have already happened that we can't change, then we just lose ourselves in that vortex, go down the rabbit hole, and it doesn't create a better life for us. And the way I look at it, everyone's here trying to do their best. And if we can all do our best together while helping other people whilst focusing on what's right here right now, everything's going to be sweet.

And even beyond that, I personally feel like it's not even so much about being in a moment. Maybe you're facing adversity and you're feeling like, "Okay, all right. What's this trying to teach me? I'm positive." It's not enough to just decide that in the moment you're going to take on that mentality. It has to already exist. You have to be living that way. And that only comes through true enlightenment, through finding yourself and going and having these conversations with yourself alone in silence in nature, whatever. But when you know you know, when you've found that place, you know you've found that place.

And it's only when you're in that place that when those times of adversity rear their ugly head, you're ready for them. And there are still going to be moments that are so fucking sheer that no amount of positive outlook, no amount of living in the present, no amount of that soul kind of discovery work is going to help you. The only thing that can help you in that moment is love, is knowing that you have love to give and knowing that people around you love you and accepting that love. Because some of the most incredibly

amazing and kind-hearted and spirited and just incredible people in the world still have the most terrible things happen to them, like people passing away in their life, maybe getting cancer. You know, on a not as morbid but still confronting scale is I'm surrounded by athletes. I've got friends who have done ACL ruptures two, three times in a row. I'm talking about the most dedicated athletes you will ever source having these things happen to them that just don't seem real. You look up and you just have to look up to the sky. How does this keep happening?

And you've just got to be, "Why? How is this possible? Who have I wrong?" And the answer is no one. That's it. There's level of control we have and that's it. And it's moments like that that these people, no matter how kind of pure their outlook on life and all of that is, there's nothing that can be said and no kind of refocus or reshift that can happen. You just have to be like, "Nah, that's shit, but I love my family. My family loves me. I love my friends. I have love. There's love there and that will get me through this period."

And then I can refocus and find that outlook again. And I just feel like that's just so important and not spoken about. No, it's not spoken about enough. And that's why I love this medium of long form communication conversation because we can talk about it and hopefully, at least my mum will listen. Your mum will probably listen. She'll probably listen. But that's the thing. As long as people listen, this opens up that conversation outside of you, which is a cool place to be. Pump up absolute soccer. Pump up absolute soccer. Yeah. How can people get around it?

How can people get involved? We've got our holiday camps coming up in September, October. So we just run all day holiday camps. We're running them at Peninsula Grammar in Mount Eliza for kids aged 5 to 16. And we just have an absolute load of fun all day, teaching them soccer skills in a fun and learning environment. And obviously, we've got competitions, we've got penalty shootout, crossbar challenge, all of that. So the kids absolutely have a ball on holiday camps. And then beyond that, we do weekly skill sessions throughout the week after school on a Monday and Thursday.

So they just want one hour sessions to keep their soccer going in the off season, or even beginners if they want to get involved. Like I said, absolute soccer is for, we're for absolutely everyone. And we're starting up some elite sessions next term as well. So we're going to have some small group training with our head coaches, more of an elite environment, getting and working on more technical aspects in a small group. So yeah, lots of exciting stuff to come and looking forward to having all the kids involved and just continuing to do what I love.

It's as simple as that. And hopefully we'll see you on the double league, W league circuit next year. Next year? Yeah, next year. This year. Both. Yeah, bit of a summer thing. So yeah, hopefully this year, I'll be, you know, be out there. But you know, it's not to be, it's not to be, whatever happens happens, but we're in that pursuit and we're at Virtus every morning trying to get the rig right. Yeah, plug! Yeah! So, the rig will be elite. We'll get there. Good from you. Yeah. Love your work. All good. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks a lot.