Mathew Schulz is on the verge of a basketball scholarship with an American college, an opportunity he couldn’t have even imagined just five years ago.
Before he started playing competitively and training with the Australian Basketball Academy, he weighed around 150kg.
“When I got on the scales it would only register up to 150kg,” he says. “It was actually reading an error.”
In 2008 he started playing domestic basketball with Keon Park and, at 213 centimetres – seven feet in the old school – he soon attracted attention.
He was spotted by a coach from the Whittlesea Pacers, who asked if he wanted to try out for the under-18s team.
It was while playing there that he was seen by Sedale Threatt, the former NBA player best known for his stint with the Los Angeles Lakers.
Threatt is one of the coaches with the Australian Basketball Academy, and asked Schulz to train with them.
“The academy has been fantastic,” Schulz says. “The coaches have been great and it is a really intense program.”
How intense? “I’ve lost about 30kg because of all the training I’ve done with them,” he says. “I’m down to around 120kg now after losing it all in a year or two years. Looking back at the photos it’s just incredible.”
Before mates brought him down to Keon Park, Schulz says he “did nothing”. “Sport wasn’t anything that really interested me all that much but now I can’t get enough of basketball.”
Now 18, Schulz has already been to the United States twice with the academy, experiences he relishes, even leaving aside the basketball.
“It’s been absolutely fantastic,” he says, naming Los Angeles and Las Vegas as the standouts. “The first time it was just a great experience to be in a different culture with different customs and food and everything like that.”
He says the academy, run by the Australian Basketball Digest, has been great for young Australian basketballers hoping to make the most of themselves overseas, with the sport languishing at the top level here.
“The academy sends over emails with information on all the players to all the coaches in America,” he explains. “Then it’s a process of talking to coaches to work something out.”
Hoping to go to either Alaska or North Carolina, Schulz is excited for his future. “I’d love to go over, play college basketball, get my degree and play professionally,” he says.
“I don’t really know what I’d study, maybe something in civil engineering, or teaching, or maths, or physics. I really don’t know. But I really just want to see how far basketball can take me. I mean, if I can lose 30 kilos what else can I do?”
