Hello I’m Alexander Adams, I’m currently doing my last day of work placement with Helping Hoops. Work placement is a part of my school’s curriculum. The school I go to is SEDA which stands for Sports Education Development Australia. And I’m doing the basketball program with Basketball Victoria and Melbourne Tigers or now known as Melbourne United. SEDA is VCAL which stands for Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning. This is another alternative for VCE just way more hands on and outdoors. We do one to two clinics a week at different primary schools. With SEDA and their work placements I luckily got a spot at Helping Hoops because my mother’s friend who had done work with Helping Hoops in the past.
In the 4 great months I have had with Helping Hoops I have learnt a lot of new things, and things that’ll I’ll keep with me for life. I have made a lot of new friends and met a lot of great people at Helping Hoops.
From day one Adam McKay me the daunting task of planning, organising and completing my own fundraising event. I was really nervous at first but when we got into it, it became a less daunting task. I had to first choose the event I was going to do and that was hard enough! After that everything fell into place.
I chose to do a much smaller version of their annual 24 Hour Charity Shootout. I called it the ‘Alex Adams 6-hour Charity Shootout’. Quite a mouthful! It was a massive learning curve organising my own event, a lot of work was done to complete it. I had to call and book the venue, do work on the website, also I had to make the Eventbrite page with a bit of help from Adam and I had to do my own promotion.
But I did it, on Sunday the 15th of June at Victoria University. My event took place, I had not very much sleep the night before because I was thinking of all the bad things that could go wrong. But never the less it was a good day, with our best fundraiser Beverley Chambers (my mum) who raised just over $600, but sadly she shot 29 out of 139 in 15 minutes and that was a foot in front of the free throw line. Our best shooter shot 221 shots and mad 165. And beat our second place by 30 baskets. All in all the Alex Adams 6-Hour Charity Shootout raised a little over $1000, which I am really happy about.
I have also had the pleasure of coaching/playing with the Fitzroy program and the Fitzroy kids. I have made most of my friends at Helping Hoops here. The first time I went I was very nervous but the kids were so nice and we were friends straight away. They were all very interested about this new person in the program, but they soon got bored of me. I made them believe I played for Melbourne United Basketball in the NBL. That made them respect me more and it made me feel like a celebrity. But when I played basketball they quickly knew that I didn’t play in the NBL, and was just an amateur
I have extremely enjoyed my time at Helping Hoops and would love to do future work with them. I will miss this charity but hope to still stay in contact. I’d like to thank Adam McKay very much for giving me this opportunity of a lifetime, I have learnt a lot from him and the whole of Helping Hoops charity. I will miss Helping Hoops.