Conversations changing culture at Como Crocs footy club
Something extraordinary happened when Josh Ward turned up to run a workshop for a team of teenage rugby league players from the Como Crocs rugby league football club in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire.
The group of 16-year-old boys were super excited about doing a workshop that was going to ask them to be vulnerable, open up and talk about their emotions.
Anyone familiar with teenage boys would probably agree that’s not the first reaction you’d expect.
But that’s exactly what happened. And Josh knows why.
He’s very familiar with the Crocs. As a facilitator with Gotcha4Life program partner Tomorrow Man, he’s run numerous workshops for us since the club reached out to our founder Gus Worland after a member took their life in 2018.
Now Josh is seeing firsthand the real results - and cultural change - from the club’s ongoing investment in mental fitness training.
“The club is just pumping. It’s bursting at the seams with players and mental fitness is very much on their minds.”
“A lot of the guys have been in two or three workshops now. They’re Shire men, footy players, tradies, hard core - but they know how to open up. They’re breaking the stereotype.
“That’s what stood out with the 16s group. They were just so excited to have conversations about breaking the stereotype too.”
Josh puts the impact down to a ripple effect through the club, from the senior players down.
“These kids really look up to the guys that play first grade. They have heard the older guys talk about this and encourage it - and they were excited to experience it themselves.”
“A lot of the first graders coach the younger players. Others model the practices they learn in workshops - like opening up before and after training.
“It’s part of the culture now. They can still have banter, but they can have conversations with emotion too.
“I have never seen a group so affected by the culture. It blew me away.”
That’s a big call from someone who runs between 300 and 400 workshops a year for dozens of sporting clubs and other organisations.
“I have never seen it happen so soon. I thought we wouldn’t see the benefit of engaging in those conversations for another five years.
“For it to happen in a club in a three to four year span - to be already seeing the benefits of this - it feels incredible. It just gives me so much hope.”
His message to other clubs considering their own mental fitness journey?
“I think everyone underestimates the power of their influence on the younger generation. You don’t realise how much that younger crew look up to the older ones.”
“The cavalry’s not coming. You have to do it yourselves. You are the guys that the boys look up to. You can never underestimate the power of that.
“People sometimes go, ‘Oh I don’t need to open up, nothing’s going on with me’ but you stifle the culture if no-one speaks up.
“If you practise it, you normalise the idea of opening up when you are struggling.
“It’s so cool to think that the toughest men those 16-year-olds know are guys who can speak to their emotions.”
“You can be both as a guy - manly and vulnerable. You can be manly, you don’t have to lose that - but you can open up too.”
And that workshop with the excited 16 year old boys?
“It was incredible. Heaps of those boys opened up, spoke about things they had never talked about before,” Josh says.
“Instead of spending the first half of the workshop trying to break down the societal norms and barriers - when that is already broken down to a degree, you can launch into those conversations and skills to support you when you’re going through something.
