My first blog of the year can always be a bit of a tricky one. Deciding how I want to kick the season off. I might be deciding what I want to share from my off-season or weighing up if I feel like I need to close off from the previous season. My blogs have come to rather an abrupt end over the past few seasons. Sometimes I need time and space to process and reflect on some significant experiences. Whilst the Club have had the great fortune of having brushed shoulders with success over the past few seasons, we have stumbled at the final or penultimate hurdle and each year has left me heartbroken and desolate to varying degrees.
The 2021 SSN season was HUGE for all involved and ultimately, I feel like I would be doing my blog a disservice if I didn’t reflect on it with the openness and honesty that I value so much. When friends, family or fans have asked me how I found the 2021 season, my answer is something along the lines of “…horrendous, I really struggled!”. Most people are surprised to hear this, given that it was the season after the initial uncertainty of when covid first hit. I have found the two seasons to be very different and although both years threw up challenges, last season hit me the hardest.
Coming into the pre-season of 2021, I had great clarity and a purpose around what I wanted to achieve, both as an individual and for the group. I had been nursing a foot injury throughout 2020 and had spent from October (when I returned to the UK) to coming back to Perth in February off of the court and in the gym rehabbing. As I mentioned in ‘Let’s Be Frank: the rollercoaster continues’ it was peak covid at the time in England, so we spent almost the whole period in lockdown and when I did leave the house it was for groceries or solo rehab sessions under an elite sport training exemption. Despite having to undergo a two-week hotel quarantine (without a window that opened) upon my return to Perth, I was really looking forward to getting back to WA, re-connecting with the team, living a ‘normal’ life, and continuing to work my way back onto court.
From my personal recollections the first half of the 2021 season went incredibly well, and I remember coming out of my mid-season review feeling buoyant and motivated for the second half of the year. Having begun to engage with an external clinical psychologist off of the back of some struggles in the 2020 season, I was able to free up some mental and physical space to utilise Fevers’ performance psychologist more effectively and work on some elements of my psychological preparation for performance, which I had previously not had the mental capacity for or desire to do.
From the mid-way point in the season onwards I recall everything internally and externally beginning to undo at a drastic pace. The covid situation was unravelling around Australia, SSN games were being moved, opponents changed, and teams were being relocated with less than 24hours notice, moving from state to state with decisions being made on an hourly basis. We were initially relocated to Melbourne (where we played the Swifts, in what I think was a home game for them) for the remainder of the season, only to return to Perth within a week. It was then decided that the rest of the season would play out in South Australia, so many of the teams packed their bags and moved on to there. However, during that time we were given a couple of home games, one of which, ironically, was against the Thunderbirds. I can’t recall for sure but maybe one SSN round was played in SA before more emergency Zoom meetings took place and a decision was made that the remainder of the season would be played in a hub… in Melbourne possibly, but maybe even Brisbane, and due to the tight turnaround, the teams travelling from SA would be notified at the airport of their final destination. Amongst all of this, let’s not forget about the time that we went to the airport, checked in, and then ended up going home as our training exemptions arrived on the 11th hour. As well as ‘that Vixens game’ and the weighted vest of a 12-point deduction.
2020 was a year of absolute chaos and uncertainty for all, however, in the face of those new and unknown challenges we put our foot to the floor on the resilience peddle, prepared well physically and mentally during the postponement of the season, and threw all the clichés at the wall to see what stuck for us, ‘control the controllables’ being a big hitter throughout the year. When the 2021 season began to veer out of control and I tried to tap into anything resembling the resilience from 2020 I found my tank to be completely empty. When I feel internal conflict or compromise to my values and beliefs I feel incredibly challenged as a person and whilst I eventually managed to ‘go with the flow’ (another cliché!) in 2020 I was unknowingly carrying huge amounts of emotional fatigue into the 2021 season and frankly, completely fed up with hard choices and what I felt was a lack of decisiveness from the league. My nervous system was absolutely shot, and my fight or flight instinct began to run in overdrive. I would have always described myself, if asked, as a very resilient person, but for reasons that are still hard to ascertain I had hit my absolute limit of uncertainty.
I am a person who loves a routine and plan, I appreciate a rationale for why things are the way they are, and I have become inconveniently stubborn about living a life that aligns with my core values. I could not understand the decision-making process of the competition and I felt incredibly conflicted and now what I recognise to be emotionally unsafe.
What I really struggled to rationalise at the time was why everyone else seemed to be coping with the insanely unstable scenarios and willing to keep going along with things when I felt completely out of control and overawed. I felt emotionally isolated, and my thoughts were overwhelmingly negative. Swirling with uncontrolled momentum from one disastrous scenario to another. My emotional regulation was non-existent, and everything made me panic, feel anxious, overwhelmed, and become incredibly rigid in my thoughts and feelings.
Arguably, performance wise I was having and had one of my best seasons in SSN, experiencing an overwhelming amount of success against extreme adversity with WCF and making an alternative position on the court my own. I feel like it is no coincidence that I was able to maintain a consistent standard of performance, despite my struggles, due to the consistency of the work that I was able to engage in with the WCF performance psychologist and for that I am extremely grateful. Although I still feel a certain level of dissociation from many of the experiences I had last season, even now.
Beyond the SSN season, my mental state continued to impact my netball as I ended up having to withdraw from the New Zealand leg of the Roses tour following our loss to the Giants in the preliminary final. I could not process getting on a plane to Christchurch (via Singapore) and going into another two-week hotel quarantine, without guarantees of training exemptions, or even that we would actually play the Taini Jamieson Cup due to the level of restrictions that were in place at the time. As it transpires, the team made history and experienced incredible successes over there and although I still do not feel like I could have been the best or even an okay version of myself over there, I was disappointed to miss another milestone in the Roses history and very much looking forward to re-joining the team when they made it over to Australia for that final leg of the tour, having had a little bit of time to stand still. Covid related travel logistics and domestic and international border restrictions continued to wreak havoc and at the very last moment, those games were unfortunately cancelled, and I was able to make my way back home to England.
Although I probably share quite a lot of myself when I write, it is usually quite a while after an event when I have had time to reflect. I am not very good at sharing my struggles in the moment, even if I have a supportive network of people around me and I am not someone who asks for help at all. Something that I am working incredibly hard at (with help!) is trying to seek to understand and recognise much earlier when I am reaching my limits, to avoid letting myself deteriorate back to breaking point again. It is challenging to have who you are and what you believe to be your strengths ultimately fail you. I am trying to learn new ways of managing uncertainty and develop strategies to cope with and understand anxiety, as this is something that I have previously been completely unfamiliar with. An important part of this has been having compassion towards myself and understanding better how I feel, to better engage the people around me and not isolate myself. In my work environment we are constantly working individually and as a group to have a coherent narrative of what we are experiencing and why, but for now, as a minimum, making sense of things for myself and psychological acceptance has been a big step forward and the new foundations that I am laying are setting me up for stability and more success in 2022 (any beyond) in all circumstances.
Frank x
@StcyJyneFrancis
If you are having a tough time, please visit the WA Government’s ‘Getting Help’ page - https://www.mhc.wa.gov.au/getting-help/
