Maverick Weller embraces the power of meditation as his career takes flight at St Kilda
MAVERICK Weller lights the candles and settles into a peaceful pose. What that unleashes at weekends is one of footy’s most dynamic, powerful and elite footballers.
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WHAT do you think about when you close your eyes?
Family? Friends? Work? Stress? Sex? Nothing?
When Maverick Weller closes his eyes — he calls it visualisation — he thinks about football, teammates, intensity, speed and glory.
He doesn’t think for fun, he thinks because its power.
Five times a week for 20 minutes, Weller meditates. He has a meditation room at home. He turns the lights out, lights candles, dons headphones, listens to motivation speech and then silence.
He says it’s the most stimulating necessity in his preparation, a kind of engagement with the inner senses. The muscles. The mind. The motivation. The scenarios. He thinks before it happens.
He started visualisation with sports pyschologist and former rugby league player Mark Edmondson a short time before being cut by the Gold Coast Suns at the end of 2013.
He was angry and disillusioned. Taken as a 17-year-old special by the start-up Suns in 2010, he thought he was a hot-shot, that football would unfurl itself before him.
It had always been that way since he was star junior in Burnie, Tasmania. There, he was always fitter, faster, better, so why wouldn’t be the same at the Suns.
It didn’t happen. Weller played 32 games before being called to the office and told he was being delisted.
He was lost, a player without a team, and then Edmondson, who was based on the Gold Coast, helped Weller find himself again.
What do you want to be, Edmondson asked. What are your strengths? How can you feed those strengths?
On October 14, 2013, Weller wrote a mission statement of sorts.
“In my AFL career,” it started, “I became captain and leader for one of the best AFL clubs in the league. We have won premierships, I’ve created a reputation as machine on the field and off the field I was known as a humble, respectful role model.
“Along the way, my status attracted great people and opportunities in my life. I will do things for the community and to be an ambassador for a great charity.
“Outside of my sporting career I have a wonderful life, I’ve got a great wife, wonderful kids, great social network, quality friends, a great house in a great area. I’ve got all things one could wish for.
“During my career, I was smart enough to invest sensibly and to amass income streams, set up my saving programs which gives me certainty so after my career I can live comfortably. I developed myself degrees and diplomas.
“Day to day, I live a happy, healthy life, every day I feel a sense of fulfilment and I love who am I and what I’m doing.”
“That last line,’’ he told the Herald Sun this week. “I didn’t love who I was and what I was doing.”
He’s different, Maverick Weller. He’s self-assured, probably self-obsessed, but incredibly self-driven and team-oriented.
I see myself doing things that I haven’t done before. Everything I do is dynamic. I kick really good goals, I visualise our team winning. “I visualise when we run off and everyone’s up and about and Richo comes up and says, ‘Good stuff, mate’, and he gets around all the players.
- Maverick Waller
He’s a Tassie boy, the son of Daryn and Judith. He has two brothers. Tyson, 27, works in the mines in Gladstone, Queensland and Lachie, 20, who plays at the Fremantle Dockers.
He was always going to be an AFL footballer, and when he did under coach Guy McKenna, it wasn’t what he thought it would be.
“I was a good junior, but when I got there, there was 20 blokes like me,” he said.
“And instead of having a coach who came to me all the time like my junior coaches did, like ‘Mav you lead the way sort of thing’, I didn’t have that connection with Guy.
“I felt I was playing catch-up all the time, in the side, out of the side, coming off 12 months out of the game with osteitis pubis.
“I was riding this rollercoaster of emotion. I had no belief. The first year was a bit of a jumble and before I knew it was over.
“I was lost and a friend told me I should go see Mark. He changed my way of thinking.
“I went from my time at the Suns, where I was really messed up in the way I went about my football.
I used to play on the fear of failure. I was s--- scared of Guy.
“I was playing back pocket and I hadn’t played in that position, and I accepted that, but I struggled a bit. I worked hard, but I had this level of angst about me, I was anxious about anything really.
“Mark stripped it back to bare bones, really concentrated on my strengths and he realised I was worrying a lot about things I couldn’t control.
“My last game I played at Gold Coast was the best game I played for the club. I had just started to talking to Mark and I had nothing to lose.
“It was f--- the world, I’m just going to do it, I don’t care what Guy says, I don’t care what anyone says. It was a real pinch-me moment that I can play at this level.”
His Suns career was not really noteworthy. The major headlines came when he was involved in the ruckus in Thailand where he, former teammate Campbell Brown and others landed in jail.
Put in the club’s leadership group as a 17-year-old, he was kicked out of it because of the Thai fight that, he says, wasn’t his fault.
He tried to end a potential fight when, he claims, he was a king hit by a Thai police officer.
“I felt hard done by. Campbell said he was sticking up for me. This bloke was giving Campbell an earful, real personal stuff, and Campbell was giving some back.
“I went over there and said, ‘Come on, mate, let’s go’ and out of no where a Thai policeman king hit me. That led to being kicked out of leadership group.’’
And eventually the club.
Seeking a new a club, Weller went ballistic on the body.
He ran, boxed, and even took up the spartan paleo diet. It led to an invitation to train with the Saints, who would then select him with their second and last pick in the 2013 rookie draft.
It was St Kilda’s last available spot on the list.
He couldn’t thank Edmonson enough.
“I was never in the present,” he said.
“I was always in the past or future and always worried about things. I’ll tell you something. Four years ago, Mark said there’s this guy, an MMA fighter and his name is Connor McGregor.
“We used to watch interviews with Connor and Connor believes what he says and what he says was happening. Mark said was it the law of attraction. I thought it was awesome.
“So we linked in with my meditation and visualisation. I couldn’t get enough of visualisation. I was doing it every day, I was visualising playing AFL footy.”
The day after the rookie draft, Weller flew to Boulder, Colorado, to join his new coach Alan Richardson and his new teammates.
From then to now, Weller has established himself as a hardworking, high intensity half-forward who this week will play his 50th game for the Saints — against the Suns.
He started visualising this game from Tuesday.
“When I visualise, it’s pretty out there,” he said.
Please, let us in.
“I see myself doing things that I haven’t done before. Everything I do is dynamic. I kick really good goals, I visualise our team winning.
“I visualise when we run off and everyone’s up and about and Richo comes up and says, ‘Good stuff, mate’, and he gets around all the players.
“I visualise the team success and I visualise my role. I’ve been playing in the forward line, what’s that look like, so it’s my pressure, putting on massive hits and chasing.
“And then I go back to my strengths, my speed, my power, my leadership. I visualise standing up when I have to, talking to the younger players and making them feel so confident so they just go.
“When I visualise they are all powerful.’’
He meditates at home and at the club’s altitude room 10 minutes before every main training session.
“That will be very specific to training,” he said. “This is what I need to work at training. When I started visualisation, I had to visualise myself being a machine. Because I was so lost and anxious, I had to visualise myself being in the zone, having belief in myself. So I faked it until I made it.
“It’s funny because I do it at the club and Gears (Jarryn Geary) would be like, ‘What are you doing mate? We’re here to train and not here to sleep’ and get into me.’’
Fake visualisation?
“A lot of people think they visualise, but they do it when it suits them, or they get told they should do it,” he said.
“But the power of it ... I’ve seen the power.
“The power of thinking you’ve got it before you’ve got it. That vision I wrote in 2013, I was 21. I didn’t have anything to my name and now I’ve set myself up.
“I went from being delisted, having nothing really, and I’ve just bought my third house, have found my best mate in Sammy (girlfriend) and I’ve started giving back to charities.
“Just today I was made an ambassador of Maddie Riewoldt’s vision. The club has helped me to much they have been amazing.’’
Its an intriguing mindset.
It’s positive, successful and perhaps even arrogant. Told some people reading this might reckon he has his head stuck up his bum, he simply shrugs.
“I don’t care, I only care what my inner circle thinks and that’s my family, my friends, my footy club, my coach.
“They know what I’m like. I talk like this, but I work my arse off, I work my arse off every single day. I care about kids and I care about the club and I’m driven. I don’t really care what other people think.
“Some people don’t get it right. Some people just talk about themselves and deep down they know they’re not what they say about themselves. I got football taken away from me and I had to work my arse off to get it back and now I’m working my arse off every day to keep it.”
A good-looking rooster, he trains hard and eats well and his GPS numbers are in the top couple. In his second season at the club, last year he was elevated to the leadership group.
And all of it, he says, he is underpinned by the most powerful commodity he’s got — the mind.
“It’s powerful stuff,” he says again.
“At the start I had to convince myself it was going to work. Like I said, I had to fake it. I used to think if you work hard you’re going make it. But you have to switch on, your have to believe.
“All I know is this works for me. A lot of people might think what’s he doing, but I don’t care.”
Originally published as Maverick Weller embraces the power of meditation as his career takes flight at St Kilda
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