AUSTRALIAN Opals player and 2008 Beijing Olympic silver medalist Tully Bevilaqua, who grew up in Merredin, returned ‘home’ to visit on Friday.
It was a rare visit from the professional basketball player who spends five months a year playing for the Indiana Fever in the Women’s National Basketball Association in the USA.
Having just stepped off a very long plane trip she made the journey by car from Perth to Merredin where her first stop was her former school, Saint Mary’s Primary School.
She told an assembly of enthralled children to work hard at what they loved in order to achieve their dreams.
“Always put in one hundred percent, and use your heart,” Bevilaqua said.
She told the children that she felt very lucky and honored to achieve her dream of being a professional basketball player, which had allowed her travel all over the world and meet an Australian Prime Minister and several sporting heroes.
The children were allowed to pass around three of her medals including the 2008 Olympic silver medal which she won with the Australian Opals.
She also showed off her gold medal from the 2006 Commonwealth Games and her gold medal from the FIBA World Championships in Brazil in 2006, which is the only gold medal ever won by an Australian team, male or female, in the world basketball championship.
“One of the best sporting moments of my life was hearing the Australian Anthem played after we won the gold.
“I felt so proud to be Australian.”
Born Tully Crook in Merredin in 1972, she has overcome prejudice and proved herself one of the hardest-working basketball players in the world despite her small stature.
“I am one of the shortest players in the WNBA,” she said.
“People always told me ‘you’re too short, and you shoot with the wrong foot forward,’ and things like that.
“That just fueled the fire for me, to show them that I could do it.”
As a junior playing every sport available in Merredin including Australian Rules Football, Tully always knew she wanted to work in sport and dreamed of playing for the Perth Breakers or becoming a physical education teacher.
She said it was the support of her family and friends from Merredin that helped her pursue her dreams.
“If it wasn’t for my Merredin Junior Basketball coach who believed in me, and all the people who sold thousands of lamingtons to raise money for me to travel to state tryouts and so on, I may not have succeeded.”
After achieving her dream of playing for the Perth Breakers, Bevilaqua still had plenty more in store for her and moved to the USA and began playing for the WNBA in 1998.
In 2004 when she was playing for Seattle Storm, the team won the WNBA championship.
It wasn’t until the age of 34 that Bevilaqua was selected to represent Australia and subsequently went to the Beijing Olympics.
“That’s why I like to tell children that if you don’t succeed at first, don’t give up,” she said.
“Some people think that if they don’t make it in their sporting career in their 20s, they have failed.”
After visiting Saint Mary’s, Tully held a free junior coaching clinic at the Merredin Regional Community and Leisure Centre, and then enjoyed a community dinner in the Grandstand Bar.
The dinner raised money for the Merredin Basketball Association and was somewhat of a Crook family reunion, with Bevilaqua grandparents, cousins and other relatives who still live in Merredin.
At the dinner she announced that she plans to retire from professional basketball at the end of 2010 and focus on the basketball camps she runs for children in America.
“I would also like to take up sports commentating, but if that doesn’t work out maybe I can find a job coaching junior basketball in Merredin.”
Bevilaqua currently lives in Indianapolis, USA, with her two dogs Aussie and Chips and her cat Frank the Tank.
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