Cairns Keen on Player Welfare

The Cairns Taipans are placing a focus on player wellbeing in NBL23, with coach Adam Forde placing a conscious effort into prioritising “the human being, not the player”.

The Taipans have exceeded expectations to start the new season and currently sit third on the ladder with a 3-1 record. They handed the reigning champion Sydney Kings their first defeat of the season on Friday night.

“I make sure I have an open-door policy with a lot of these guys,” Forde told ABC Far North.

“It’s a tough environment and there’s not too many jobs where people can be critical of other people. I don’t know too many plumbers that get up in the morning and check social media and they’re told they’ve done a sh*t job the night before.

“We have tools in place too just to monitor on and off the court with things and you can see their sleep pattern is erratic and that can be the sign of a hyperactive mind or someone overthinking things. It’s important you don’t get to it too late.

“The guys are around each other so much that if something slips through the cracks it gets picked up by someone else and we all make sure we look out for each other.”

With all the technological leaps forward in the tracking of health and wellbeing in recent years, it would have been easy for the Taipans to get lost amongst the countless possibilities for tracking players’ mental health.

Instead, they’ve gone back to basics, with Forde saying players complete daily check-ins before they come to training each morning.

“We’ve trialed differed things in the past,” he said. “We’ve sort of gone with each morning when the guys wake up we get them to do a wellness survey, and we get them to mark down how they rate their sleep, how long they slept for, what their motivation’s like, how their body feels.

“We trialled a few different things but the main thing we kept coming back to was just asking them, and the cool thing about it is we build the relationships with these guys where we want them to feel like they can be honest.

“there’s been times we’ve given players a couple of days off just to go to Port Douglas or go and see the Great Barrier Reef and just disconnect.

“We just check in with them every morning. It’s a person-to-person check in to rate how they are”

For the full story head to >> Cairns Taipans put player wellbeing first.