Let me tell you all a little story about my life. At the ripe old age of 10 my favourite movie was ‘Finding Nemo’ and my favorite song was ‘Gotta Be Somebody’. Pretty standard for your average kid out on the Taieri. Life was good. 

At the end of year six my parents made a fatal mistake… they sent me to Johnies. Now this is not the proudest chapter of my life but it still taught me a few lessons. I remember one fateful day out on the fives courts. I was playing a game called Brands which involved throwing a tennis ball at people as hard as you could. Being the only junior still standing I was keen to impress all the big kids. The ball bounced just in front of me and in one motion I picked up and threw. I tracked the ball as it whistled out of my hand and hit him directly in the face. Now I’m not gonna lie, at first I found this rather funny. It’s always funny when someone gets hit in the face right? The whole court erupted with laughter but seconds later the reality of the situation struck me. This poor guy was holding his face, blood dripping through his hands. The next few hours were spent in the sick bay as he nursed his lip. I was genuinely worried for him, there was a lot of blood. I had managed to shift his front tooth a little to the left. We ended up shaking hands and walking away from it and to this day I haven’t played another game of Brands.

As many of you know my parents live overseas in Hong Kong. This comes with both advantages and disadvantages. Let me tell you, you’ll never be able to appreciate how valuable space is if you haven’t been there. Houses are literally as small as your lounge and on the market with the catch phrase “cosy” stuck to them. It takes me a good one and a half hours to get to cricket trainings. This soon became a problem with trainings as early as 6:30 in the morning because honestly who would enjoy getting up at 4:30. I remember one evening I was traveling home, it was the end of term three and I really couldn’t wait to get back. Now I somehow managed to miss my flight from Auckland to Hong Kong. I think its pretty fair to say that I soon regretted making this mistake. I was grounded, literally. Air New Zealand didn’t trust me and my parents certainly didn’t. I spent the next 13 hours at a nearby hotel under supervision. Lets just say having a complete stranger watching me sleep isn’t a situation I want to be in again.

Boys we all make mistakes. Learn from them, grow from them, and have a good day.