Opals captain Jenna O’Hea nearly quit basketball
After being dropped from the Opals in 2016, an “embarrassed” Jenna O’Hea nearly walked away from basketball. Now she’s team captain and has a point to score.
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WHEN you are watching the Opals play at the Olympics, do so knowing our captain didn’t think she would ever be selected to play for Australia again after being dropped from the squad before Rio. But after time in the wilderness, Jenna O’Hea fought back, got selected, was made captain and will now lead the team that is searching for our first gold medal in basketball.
HM: When did you first get thrown a ball?
JO: Straight out of the womb, I think!
HM: Who passed it to you?
JO: (laughs) … it would have been one of my brothers.
HM: Luke or Matt?
JO: Probably Luke. We were living down in Traralgon, Luke and Matt both played, and Mum played in the local women’s team. I just wanted to do what Matt and Luke did! The rule
was that until I made a basket in the backyard hoop, I couldn’t play. I did that at five years old and have been playing ever since.
HM: Nature versus nurture. Do you think if your brothers played football, you’d be representing an AFLW team? Or do you think you still would have found your way onto the court?
JO: It’s a great question – my brothers had such a big influence on my life and were great role models. I think if they’d played a different sport, I would have followed in their footsteps and maybe never seen a basketball court.
HM: Who’s the better basketballer out of the two of them? Matt played for the Tigers, and Luke professionally in Ireland.
JO: I’m the best sibling! I don’t think I can separate those two … they are both OK, but …
HM: … you’re better …
JO: (laughs) Absolutely, and they would agree with me too!
HM: It’s hard to argue with the captain of the Australian basketball team.
JO: They can’t argue with it.
HM: They wouldn’t let you play with them until you put it through the hoop. You did at five, and from there things races along pretty quickly.
JO: I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I was always one of the better players in the team. I made state teams when I was bottom age, I was one of the better players when we were top age, and I went to the AIS when I was extremely young. I was on track right throughout juniors. I’m not sure whether it was in my head that I was going to represent
Australia in the national team, but I thought as my career went on, making a life out of basketball was always what was going to happen. My dreams of doing so sort of
morphed into reality.
HM: Has it been everything you hoped it would?
JO: When you’re young, you imagine everything to be lollipops and rainbows. There’s been more setbacks than I had imagined – I missed out on selection for the world champs in 2014, and then again in Rio in 2016, and I was cut from my WNBA contract with two years to run. I’ve had the ups and downs of living in Europe, in a country where I don’t speak the language, so as much as I was living out my dreams, there were some really hard times, and setbacks that I didn’t really imagine.
HM: No one dreams about the injuries and not being selected!
JO: No – they are catalogued in the nightmare section, not dreams. But I’ve been able to travel the world, met extraordinary people and formed relationships I didn’t envision either. I’ll take what I’ve been lucky enough to have been given any day.
HM: How does the conversation go when whoever it is approaches you to tell you you’re no longer required on the team? Do you see it coming, or is it a complete sideswipe?
JO: I was completely blindsided in the US. I was in Seattle, and I had two years left on a three-year contract. It was the last day of training camp, and the coach’s little minion came and said, “Jenny wants to speak to you”. As soon as you hear that, you know what’s coming. I thought that I had two years to play. I went up to the coach’s room, and
she told me they were waiving me. She pushed a box of tissues towards me, but I refused to show my emotions to her. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. That was
hard. I didn’t know whether I wanted to play basketball after that. In 2016 I was left out of the Opals squad. It was a pretty rough two years. My self-worth was at a low point. I sort
of lost all my confidence and direction.
HM: How seriously did you contemplate giving up the game?
JO: Really, really seriously. I was cut in June, but just two months before that in April I’d signed a contract with the Melbourne Boomers to play here in the off season. If I hadn’t
already signed that contract, I would have retired – I wouldn’t be playing now. I would have slunk off and gone and done something else, but I had signed, and I wanted to honour that contract. I was cut in June, and I was back on court at the start of August. I sulked for a while. I was still going to the gym, but I was too embarrassed to get back on court after being cut. I lay low, and then came back to Australia, got with my family, my friends, and found my love for the game again.
HM: Embarrassed because it was a blow to the ego?
JO: And fearful of the perceptions other people had of me. I didn’t know what those perceptions were, but I assumed people thought I had failed and I wasn’t as good as I was beforehand. I was manifesting all these issues myself. They weren’t real. But my ego was bruised and I didn’t want to be seen on the basketball court and asked by
people, “What happened in Seattle? Why were you cut?” It was a conversation I didn’t want to have. I wasn’t ready to talk.
HM: Who helped you get your mojo back?
JO: Guy Molloy was the coach of the Melbourne Boomers at the time, and was very perceptive and was really good to me and for me. He eased me back into the on-court stuff and slowly built my confidence back up.
HM: You’d gone to play in LA, France, Seattle … you hadn’t played in Australia for a long time.
JO: And I wanted to do my family proud. They hadn’t seen me play live for so long, so I wanted to put on a show for them. Throughout the season, I built up confidence and we
ended up getting to the grand final, before losing a three-game series to Townsville. I really enjoyed playing with that group of girls, and I found a love for the game again.
HM: When did you get the call-up to go back into the Opals squad?
JO: Well, Sandy Brondello took over in 2017 after a poor showing in Rio, which I wasn’t selected for. There was a camp in America, in June, which was to select our team for the
Asia Cup in September. My aunt had died suddenly of an aneurysm, and I wanted to attend the funeral and be there for my mum and my family, so I decided to not go to that camp. And to be honest, being a part of the Opals again wasn’t front of mind as I didn’t think I would be selected, so it wasn’t a big decision for me. I had to be there for my family.
HM: Another camp in January of 2018?
JO: Which was in Italy in February.
I went to that camp, and I made the Commonwealth Games team. From then on it escalated quickly!
HM: From out of the squad, to into the team, and captain.
JO: It’s wild. Never give up on your dreams, I guess.
HM: Whatever the outside world says is one thing. What I believe, and what I know I can do, is different …
JO: That’s so true. Don’t listen to the noise from those that just don’t know. I’m very fortunate Sandy and
I have respect for one another. She trusts me, respects me, and we have a
good relationship.
HM: How were you told you were our national captain?
JO: In a low key manner! I was made vice-captain of the Commonwealth Games team, and then our captain, Belinda Snell, retired. For the world cup in September of that year, we
had a team meeting. Sandy was chatting away, and then said, “And only the captain, Jenna, will be able to speak to the referees”. Just really nonchalantly, and then she just
kept on talking. I looked around to see if anyone else heard and thought, “Did she really just say that?” Then we had individual meetings, and she said, “Jenna, you looked a bit
strange when I said you were the captain” … It was very cool and I was very proud given where I had been.
HM: When you contemplate the Opals history – three Olympic silver and two bronze medals from Atlanta 1996 to London 2012, but nothing in Rio – where do you feel we sit going into Tokyo?
JO: In 2018 we got silver at the World Cup. We had a really great tournament. We played well, and we had this great lead-up all planned for Tokyo 2020. Obviously, the world has changed, so I don’t think we will be playing as many games as what we would have liked. We haven’t been together as much, but it’s the same for all countries.
HM: Are you expecting to return with slightly heavier luggage?
JO: Ha. You go in with goals, and our goal is to medal, as always. I will be very disappointed if the luggage isn’t heavier. There is just so much uncertainty in the world that I reckon there could be some surprises at this tournament. We have a team that has played a lot together, perhaps not a lot in the last year and a half, but this team is an older team with a lot of experience.
HM: When was the last time you played internationally?
JO: As a team, it was February 2020 for the qualifiers in France. I was injured. For me, it would have been November 2019. It just hasn’t been possible, so it is an odd build-up.
We are heading to Vegas in early July and play a few games there before heading to Tokyo.
HM: When is the last time you all trained together?
JO: We tried to do a camp in March of 2020, but Covid hit. We had a camp in January of this year after our WNBL season, but not everyone was there. We had a few injuries. In
March we had a camp on the Gold Coast. A good group was there, but Liz Cambage was over in America, and Bec Allen was in Europe – two key players for us!
HM: How did you fare in lockdown? I was reading that you became incredibly unmotivated.
JO: Hearing that the Games were postponed, it was a lot to get my head around. Being in lockdown, everyone deals with things differently. Those first couple of weeks were tough. I didn’t want to do anything, and it wasn’t until the announcement that the World Cup was going to be played in Australia in 2022 that I changed my mindset. Tokyo, then
the World Cup on home soil. That’s a good way to end your national career if you can get through. I used my time to get over my wrist injury, which is why I missed the qualifiers. I’ve fixed some ongoing foot troubles that I’ve had, and now, it’s only a month until we leave!
HM: I hear you felt flat and didn’t train early on, but when you didn’t train, you felt worse.
JO: I definitely learnt a lot about myself during this lockdown. I’m a person that needs to exercise in the morning. That makes my whole day better. It was a vicious cycle if I didn’t
work out. Once I got into a good routine of doing some outdoor running sessions in the morning, my days were better and my mind was more positive and clearer on a way forward.
HM: On mental health, you’ve become an advocate and a spokesperson, given that your uncle that you were so close to, Ferg, took his own life in 2018.
JO: As soon as you say Ferg’s name it still all feels so sad and surreal. It was leading into Christmas when he took his own life.
HM: How did it affect you – you were so close.
JO: Ridiculously, I was too embarrassed to tell people what had happened, because of the stigma around it. Someone in my family had taken their own life, and I struggled with having conversations around it. Can you believe that! I started doing heaps of research and quickly realised that over eight people per day in Australia take their own lives. It made me realise that there were a lot of people suffering in silence. It can happen without any explanation and leave so many unanswered questions for the people left
behind. It struck a chord with me and ever since I have wanted to help people. People shouldn’t be suffering alone, and I want to try and reduce the stigma in Australia around
mental health and suicide. I want to start those conversations. We did the Lifeline Round with the WNBL, which was super successful. The AIS and Lifeline have partnered to form the Lifeline Community Custodians. There are 20 athletes around the country who are all trying to start these conversations, and really trying to reduce the stigma.
HM: You had no idea Ferg was struggling, did you? When you speak to him, he would tell great stories and was always positive. It was a surprise, was it not, for everyone?
JO: It was. A lot of people simply suffer in silence, hiding what they are really feeling and thinking. It’s important to remember that. Try and always be kind, because you don’t
know what people are going through underneath the veneer. Since Covid hit, things have been exacerbated as there is a lot of isolation, and people are alone more than ever in their own thoughts. Make sure you are reaching out to family and friends,
checking in on one another, because a simple conversation can go a long way.
HM: Well said. Let’s finish on the Games. Nine years between Olympics …
JO: How ridiculous does that sound!
HM: When you think about Tokyo, from what you know and what you assume, how does it look day to day? Are you walking into empty stadiums? Being tested twice a day? What do we know?
JO: What we know is there are a lot of unknowns! It will be very different to my first experience. In London I was rooming with my best friend who I had known since I was
seven years old, Kathleen MacLeod. My family was over there, including my aunts and uncles, my brother and sister-in-law. After every game I would go and eat with them out
by the village. This time, we won’t have any family support, which will be hard. We will be tested every day, the dining hall will have a different look, we can’t go and support
other events, which was something that I really enjoyed about the last Olympics I went to. It’s going to be different, but at the end of the day, we are there to play basketball, and to win a gold medal. You have to forget about the other stuff and concentrate on the basketball. It’s still an Olympics, it’ll just look and sound different.
HM: Thank you for chatting. Fingers crossed. There will be a lot of Australians cheering hard for the skipper and her Opals.
JO: Thank you very much – I hope we do well for everyone.
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