How Young Athletes Train Full-Time Without Falling Behind in School | 42

Welcome to the episode

Brett: Hello and welcome to another episode of Future Learners. I am Brett Campbell, co-founder and CEO of Euka Future Learning, and today we have a special episode. I am joined by Melvyn, who is the Sporting Director and Global Operations Manager of Sunshine Coast FC, a partner of ours and a partnership we are really excited about. We brought Melvyn in today to tell us and tell you about the academy and what they are doing.

Brett: At Euka, we believe we are a very pioneering organisation, and we only partner with people who are working in a very similar field. What Sunshine Coast FC are doing, I wish was available in Melbourne when I was a kid. So we want to talk about this opportunity, and also check in on how a lot of our students have been going and how it really works when you are an aspiring athlete trying to get your schooling completed as well. Melvyn, welcome to the episode.

Melvyn: Thanks for having me, Brett. It is really interesting.

What is Sunshine Coast FC?

Brett: Let us start by giving our listeners an overview. What is Sunshine Coast FC?

Melvyn: The FC obviously stands for Football Club, but we have many facets to our operation. We are more of a sporting club, Brett. Football is our core business, but we also have a basketball program, a netball program, and a dance academy. All of them are full-time. By full-time I mean the students combine their academic studies with full-time training, and full-time training is between 16 and 20 hours per week during the working day.

Brett: And for those who are unsure of what football is, the running joke, it is soccer. I will do the interpretation. One of the things that was really exciting when you reached out to Euka is that we accommodate a very wide variety of needs. One of our largest growing cohorts is the aspiring athlete arena. Close to about 5 percent of our students are in that space. We have Olympic athletes, world champions, aspiring athletes from dance through to football. We are living in a very different world now than when I was at school.

A real working week at the academy

Brett: When you talk about 16 to 20 hours of training, how have you currently set up the process? How does it operate? You have been operating prior to reaching out to Euka and adopting a very different education philosophy. Talk to me about how that looks from the schooling element.

Melvyn: We transitioned our program from part-time to full-time bang in the middle of the pandemic in July 2020. People thought we were crazy, but it is a similar sort of story to yourselves with Euka. You have to be innovative and you have to be bold. We currently have a partner college, Peregian Beach College, based on the Sunshine Coast. They deliver mainstream education from prep to Year 12 which is stock standard for any educational institution.

Melvyn: What we wanted to do was mirror what the academies were doing in the United Kingdom and other parts of the world. We worked closely with the academic team and the principal to devise a timetable which could encompass training within the day without cutting any corners on the education. We went from piloting the program with 26 student athletes when we kicked off in July 2020, to 70-odd within eight or nine months, to over 100 within 12 months, and as we speak today we are about 180 full-time student athletes based at Peregian Beach College. That is funded academic tuition by our sporting operation.

What does a training week actually look like?

Brett: How does it work with the school itself? Students have to attend, but it is school with some extra benefits. Are they allowed to train as part of the curriculum setup? How does it look at a basic level?

Melvyn: Let me talk through what a working week looks like in our full-time academies. Generally, we do not have access to the athletes on a Monday morning because they have had competition on the weekend and they are still in their recovery process. Our first point of contact is Monday afternoon at 2:45 PM. They report for school on Monday morning, do lessons through the day, and there is a gym session during the day with our strength and conditioning team. We have full-time S&C coaches and full-time sports scientists.

Melvyn: Tuesday is our main contact day. Athletes report at 7:15 AM for sport-science testing and data collection. We have many platforms including Polar and Apollo Sciences. We do heart-rate variability testing, thermal muscle scanning, and various data collection to get everybody’s baseline recovery status for the week. After testing they go into academic lessons up until lunchtime, then we have them on the field from 12:30 PM through to roughly 4:30 PM.

Melvyn: Wednesday morning we have them back in at 7:15 AM until 8:30 AM for another technical session on the field. They have quite a big break where they go into academic lessons up until about 2:30 or 3:00 PM, and then we have them back out until 5:00 PM. Thursday morning we do not touch them. They report for school as normal, have academic lessons until about 12:30 or 1:00 PM, and then we have them back out until 4:30 PM. There are gym sessions, performance analysis, and practical elements throughout.

Melvyn: Friday is more relaxed. We will do one component around midday because a lot of the players are preparing for competition on Saturday or Sunday. We taper the training on Friday to help maintain them or prepare them for the weekend. And then they have games on the weekend.

Brett: My back-of-the-napkin maths says they are doing 50 percent school, 50 percent training.

Melvyn: Yeah, but it is still not enough training for us, Brett. We are greedy people. Sport people are greedy people. That is how we came across you.

Why elite-level matters: the new UK pathway

Brett: This isn’t just a “come to school and get to play your favourite sport” setup. You are serious about creating athletes. Which leads into the next part. Talk to us about the new program you have created, the one that allows kids to travel to Europe to play under a totally different regime.

Melvyn: We had some challenges in our state within the football fraternity. We could see them coming, but we wanted to grow our operation and provide additional pathways which would make the competition more robust and produce more talented players for the Australian nation. When we started looking at this in 2018, that did not sit well with various organisations that govern football in Queensland. That did not deter us. In 2023 we decided to expedite the process of our pathway from Australia to other parts of the world.

Melvyn: I am originally from the UK, albeit an Australian citizen now. I still maintain my contacts in the UK football fraternity. That enabled us to legally affiliate our football club in the United Kingdom under the name Sunshine Coast FC UK, and to participate in extremely robust youth competitions, some of the best in the UK at their specific age groups of Under-16, Under-18 and Under-23. We are about to develop and move into the senior men’s space.

Melvyn: What we required was another unique opportunity from an educational perspective. Rather than just pulling from our academy, we opened the network up across Australia. Last year we had around 167 applications vying for 32 spots to play in the United Kingdom. Players came from Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, Cairns, regional Queensland. We had contact from New Zealand.

The state-by-state curriculum problem

Melvyn: Each state has a national education curriculum, as you know, but there are slight variations in different states. That provides complexities to try and get everybody on the same page. When you have students enrolled in Year 11 going into Year 12 who have already done their elective subjects, Year 11 has to marry up with Year 12, and different states are delivering Year 11 to Year 12 differently.

Melvyn: Our partner school, Peregian Beach College, were having some of these challenges trying to align Year 11 and Year 12 across states. That is when we did our research, our due diligence, whatever you would like to call it. We found you guys at Euka and made contact. I think it was Jake at the offset, and then it was full steam ahead. The service we have had from Euka has been top class. The support, the guidance, even working with our academic institution at Peregian Beach College. There has been communication back and forth, and even with the parents. It has been seamless.

Mainstream vs Euka: what changed for the athletes

Brett: I am really interested in this. We pride ourselves on creating not just an ability for a student to log in, tick some boxes and be on their way. We want to provide flexibility. The fact that you are now able to take 32 aspiring athletes, this is the big leagues. This is not just deciding to go to a school and play your favourite sport for four or five hours. This is putting yourselves against some of the best youth in the world. And you approached it in two different ways. Not all of your students took the Euka model. You also brought a teacher across. Talk to us about that, because for me it was eye-opening but also validating.

Melvyn: It is important to bring the truth to the table. A lot of people who do podcasts mask things over and paint rosy pictures. We had real challenges, and the challenges came from mainstream education. There is a large element of rigid learning attached to mainstream education. I am certainly not knocking it, because it has a place, and it is horses for courses for parents and guardians. We support all of our athletes whether they are on mainstream education or on the future learning platform.

Melvyn: Our preference is to have all of our athletes with Euka on the homeschool program. We are replicating what the very sharp end of football is doing in the United Kingdom, the Premier League. The vast majority of Premier League clubs run their youth program as full-time and school them inside the football club. This is the closest any kid will ever get from Australia to Premier League football, by embarking on this with us in football, and also jumping on with Euka Future Learning.

Melvyn: We still have a number of athletes on mainstream education in the UK, and as much as they are doing well in football, they have a lot of challenges in terms of the education. They have to be in contact with the teacher, they have exams, certain parameters, exam conditions. We have provisions in place to deliver the program as prescribed. But the online platform with Euka is less rigid, which means there is less stress on the students.

Melvyn: You can tell the ones on mainstream education and the ones on future learning. You can sense it when you are around these athletes. We live with these athletes. I have spent significant time with them over the last six months. You can feel and sense that some of the athletes are under pressure with the mainstream education program, and the ones doing the future learning program have more of a relaxed persona.

What Melvyn tells parents in the recruitment process

Melvyn: I am the one doing all the recruitment for student athletes going to the UK. I am the first point of contact, and I am also the person who, for want of a better word, is selling the program. I have to talk about the Euka program and the mainstream education program, and offer the holistic package. I always lean towards steering parents to look at the future learning platform, because of the stress and strain mainstream education can lay on a young person at a critical stage in their life when they are vying to get into a professional football club.

Brett: I always look at things through the outcome we are trying to solve for. In your case, you are wanting to give your students the best possible shot at becoming a professional athlete. What that means is that education is not the first cab off the rank in terms of when it happens. It still has to happen, but it has to fit around the sport. We now live in a world where unless you are going down specific routes like medicine or law, the rigidity of school as the first priority does not always serve the child. Aspiring athletes are a clear example.

Brett: Even if they have one class on a Wednesday at 10 AM in a subject they are not great at, or they do not enjoy, or they are behind on, or they do not like the teacher, that one thing can be the thing that hijacks them the night before and stays with them the day after. We are trying to create high-performing athletes here. Euka was built for that. We say we are the backbone for students who want to aspire to bigger, better things and who cannot sit at a desk all day to do their schoolwork.

Education still matters: the honest reframe

Brett: I want to reframe that, because we absolutely still believe in education. Not all of these athletes are going to become professionals. That is the reality. But the beauty of what you have built is that you have set it up around the outcome of a student aspiring to be a professional, and at the same time making sure they are ticking the boxes and getting an education. Because that is still required.

Brett: One thing you said to me that was validating: the students still on the school methodology in the UK, with the teacher and the exams, versus the Euka students who are self-learning, self-pacing. We do not just leave them to their own devices either. If they need anything they can put their hand up and talk to a teacher. But they require less time with a teacher, they can get the work done at their own pace, and not all 30 kids are learning the same thing at the same time. That is the in-built flexibility.

What the conversation with parents sounds like

Brett: I want to hear from you about this. Homeschooling, we call it future learning, is growing. But there are still doubts for parents. When you sit with them, even though they want their child to be an aspiring athlete, some will still say “I would prefer the school with a teacher.” What are those conversations like? Future learning hasn’t yet become as equal as mainstream in many parents’ minds.

Melvyn: I tackle it as a parent. My own kids have been through mainstream school education in the UK and Australia. The world is evolving. I don’t mean to sound like a maverick. I am not a rocket scientist. I just have my ear to the ground. I keep myself abreast of everything that is staying ahead of the curve, which is why we are linked with you.

Melvyn: I always say to parents, the words “future learning” mean exactly what they say. This is the way the world is going. We talked the other day about Amazon, where everything is done digitally, online, remote. When I am talking to parents now, the conversation is always related to the health and wellbeing of the young person, particularly mental health. It is a taboo subject but a prominent one around the globe. A lot of stress and anxiety is centred around exams, assessments, going to school, dealing with people face to face, a child who does not like delivering in front of people. I have seen it year in, year out.

Melvyn: I used to be a post-16 lecturer in the UK, so I can speak from experience as an educator. What appeases or alleviates parents’ concerns is when I explain the online platform. It is done at their own pace. If you put two athletes in a room, one doing future learning and one doing mainstream, they will both come out with the same certificate of education. But one is sitting in a classroom being directed, while the other is at their own pace with support. You would be shocked at how the future learning student performs because it is a more relaxed environment.

Melvyn: There is no cheating, they still have to do the work. But they are not being told what to do and not move around. There are so many stresses and strains on these kids in an academic environment today. For your child to excel in life, what we need to do is remove as many barriers as we possibly can. We appreciate young people need to be stretched and challenged. They need to come out of their comfort zone slightly. However, the way the world is going, why are we putting kids behind a desk for six, seven, eight hours a day, robotic, bell rings, lesson finishes, next class, bell rings, lesson starts?

Melvyn: With future learning, they are managing their own time. Indirectly, this is setting young people up for time management in how they conduct themselves through the online platform. You do not need a bell telling you when to start and when to stop. You do not need to move from one classroom to the next, with another teacher unhappy with you because they had a row at home the night before and they are grumpy. You really do manage your own time.

Melvyn: When we talk to parents during recruitment about this, you can almost see the light coming on. All of them say “send me the digest.” We send the literature. We give them Ellen’s number and Jake’s number, the parents liaise directly with them, and nine times out of ten they are satisfied with the inquiry. A lot of education in Australia is centred around image. My kid wears a blazer, my kid goes to this school or that school. But my kid is going to come out with the same outcomes as your kid, without the same stresses and strains.

Closing thoughts

Brett: This is the way the future is moving. There are options now, which is what I love. There are options for families to choose whatever path they want. If you want your child to be an aspiring athlete, or an aspiring actor, or anything, you have to ask: how do we put them in the best position possible? It is very hard when you have to be at school from 9 to 3 every day. Not everyone learns the same way, at the same time, or at the same pace. Until recently there has not been a real option for parents. Now there is.

Brett: Anyone listening, if you are interested in finding out more about Sunshine Coast FC, head to sunshinecoastfc.com.au. Love what you guys are doing, Melvyn. Love being part of it. Looking forward to our partnership growing and helping more of your students. And looking forward to those corporate box tickets when one of our players is playing in the Premier League.

Melvyn: Let’s go, Brett. I am actually heading over to the UK on the 16th of November. If there is interest from parents to have another podcast with some of our athletes in the UK, talking about the Euka learning platform from their own perspective, I would be more than happy to do another session. The more informed parents are, the better judgement they can make.

Brett: Awesome, we appreciate that. Thank you for your time today, Melvyn. And to everyone listening, that is sunshinecoastfc.com.au. Go check it out.