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Former AFL champion Eddie Betts has revealed for the first time the trauma he felt after a “strange” and “completely disrespectful” leadership training camp he attended as an Adelaide Crows player in pre-season of 2018.
In a new autobiography, The Boy from Boomerang Crescent, to be published on Wednesday, the three-time All-Australian player says the secret four-day camp held on the Gold Coast, run by a group he has chosen not to name, went off. him feeling “as if a piece of me had been brainwashed.”
In the book, Betts writes that confidential information he had given in a private counseling session was misused during the camp and that the camp co-opted sensitive Aboriginal cultural rituals that offended him and endangered his well-being of other younger indigenous players within the crows. and it affected his family life. He blames it on a lack of form in 2018 that ultimately prompted him to leave the Crows.
“The camp ended up appropriating a First Nations ritual of ‘talking stick’ and trying to apply it to all of us, even the non-Indigenous players and coaches.
“From my point of view, the talking stick was being used improperly, and I also did not know that any elders had given permission to use it.
“There was all kinds of weird shit that was disrespectful to many cultures, but particularly and extremely disrespectful to my culture,” Betts writes in the book.
Betts says he should live the rest of his life with the shame of taking part in some of the most confrontational exercises.
“It all made me feel so sick”
Betts writes that her first “serious reservations” about the camp began after a mandatory hour-long psychological evaluation, conducted over the phone by a person she understood to be a counselor at the Mental Training Specialist Group and leadership
“We were told that we didn’t have to do the interview with our partners by ear and that the purpose of the questions was to create a profile of us who would be working at the camp,” Betts writes.
Eddie Betts with his partner Anna and their children.
He says he opened up to the interviewer and disclosed what he described as private life experiences, believing it would help specialists appreciate “the cultural complexities” of his life.
“I thought it would be used to create a profile about me that showed the obstacles I’ve overcome to be successful and play in the AFL.”
The red flag for Betts was when the interviewer tried to gain Betts’s trust by claiming he was familiar with Aboriginal culture: “He tried to make it seem like he was like me, like I should feel comfortable revealing – him my trauma”.
Then 30, Betts, who was part of the Adelaide club’s senior leadership group, says he was told the camp would do more than bolster his game-day performances. “They told me I’d come back a better husband and father, a better teammate and get a lot off the field,” he says.
However, the Wirangu, Kokatha and Guburn man, who is a father of five, says he returned with feelings of shame and humiliation that left him angry, paranoid, secretive and “feeling exhausted and lethargic”. Betts says the emotional fallout immediately began to damage her family relationships. His partner, Anna, noticed “the extent of my distress,” Betts writes. “Anna noticed that I was starting to be quick with the kids and I started to have really bad anxiety,” she says.
That’s when the couple sat down and talked about what had happened.
The Crows adopt the ‘power position’ as they take on Richmond ahead of the 2017 Grand Final.
The “Position of Power”
The Adelaide Crows began working with the leadership training group midway through the 2017 season, writes Betts.
“That mental training was mainly centered around us being ‘warriors’, things like inner voice, mastery, mindset.”
Betts was reluctant to buy into these early programs and their “unique approach” to players from different backgrounds. As the designated leader, Betts felt he needed to check on the welfare of his younger Indigenous teammates.
After the Crows lost back-to-back games in the 2017 season, Betts says the coaching group reviewed video of the games and claimed they had identified where the playing team had lost those games. The way the players had run the supporters’ banner into the ground was to blame, they said.
“Apparently our facial expressions weren’t up to par with game mode,” Betts writes. The playgroup was made to practice their facial expressions, she says.
Another mental training technique that Betts found was aimed at emphasizing the masculinity of the players. The exercise involved players forming a circle, making eye contact with each other and shouting obscenities. Betts says elements of the show make him cringe in retrospect.
Betts warms up before the first preliminary final in Adelaide in 2017. Credit: Getty
“One of the young leaves said to me: ‘I see you as an uncle. I don’t like to call you ‘f— you’ at all.” In my opinion some of the younger brothers were getting wala [angry] with these leadership specialists.”
“It didn’t make sense to me that the leadership specialists were trying to increase the energy of the angry man, or whatever it was they were after.”
Betts writes that on the eve of the 2017 final series, mental training instructors devised and implemented a technique for the team to introduce themselves after passing the club banner on the pitch. They called it “the power position”, says Betts, which meant all 22 Crows players and coach Don Pyke were with their arms down, slightly out by their sides, in a commanding stance.
Betts says the choreographed stance, intended to intimidate the opposition on match day, was even practiced at Crows training. The Crows deployed the trick ahead of their qualifying and preliminary finals and emerged from each of those games with victory, before falling to a spectacular defeat in the grand final.
The grand final at the hands of the Richmond Tigers still haunts Betts, but he says some of that may come from the techniques deployed by the instructors in pre-season training for the 2018 season.
Betts is down after missing the grand final in 2017. Credit: Getty
“We had a few odd sessions. One involved training with the Richmond club song playing at AAMI Park while doing a grueling run session.”
A harness and a knife
The technique was retooled when the team was moved to a training camp on the Gold Coast in late January 2018, Betts says.
He recalls that the camp started normally enough with routine jogging training exercises, but soon the team was separated into groups, forced to hand over their mobile phones and subjected to what he describes as a barrage of verbal abuse. and psychological intimidation with fake weapons.
According to Betts, the players were blindfolded, put on a bus with papered-up windows and taken to an undisclosed location while Richmond’s team song was looped loudly through the sound system of the bus. When the team arrived at the secret destination, the team members were instructed to remove their bandages.
Betts says the first thing they saw was a dozen burly men, all dressed in black, greeting them with the position of power.
The welcoming committee laid out the camp rules for bewildered players, Betts says.
“Things like, we weren’t allowed to shower…we had to stay sweaty and smell ‘manly.'” We also had to maintain what they described as ‘noble silence,'” Betts writes.
Camp life, which Betts’ partner Anna later told him was “cult-like,” also involved an “initiation process” for each of the participants, an exercise Betts sees as a cultural appropriation of sensitive traditional aboriginal ceremonies.
When it came time for Betts to be “initiated,” he says he was informed again that he would be made a man. He was put in a body harness with a rope attached and told to try to fight his way to a knife to break free while the comrades holding the rope physically obstructed him. The initiation also involved him being verbally abused by camp instructors, he says.
“I was called out for things I had revealed to camp ‘counselors’ about my upbringing. Everyone present heard these things,” Betts writes. “I was exhausted, exhausted and distressed by the details being shared. Another camp jumped off my back and started berating me about my mother, something so deeply personal that I was absolutely devastated to hear it come out from his mouth.”
At the end of the camp, the players were told that this exercise had provided each other with a safe space and that any issues affecting them should only be shared with other members of the group.
“Then we started an exercise of acting out our answers to our partners… One of the answers they suggested was, ‘I feel like a better father and husband, having come from this camp.’ .
Betts with his family on the beach, one of the photos included in his new book.
But after sharing his experience with his partner, Betts developed a deepening sense of regret. He also spoke to his Aboriginal elders about some of the co-opted rituals and the use of sacred and culturally sensitive words that were used in the camp. The talks led to Betts and his partner approaching club executives with their concerns.
Betts says he wanted to suspend the program to protect other Crows players from the same experiences and to establish an internal support network for some of the other players Betts says were struggling.
“After a meeting with all the…