The year away from basketball that saved Anneli Maley’s mental health and career
Anneli Maley is happy, healthy and successful. Yet she nearly quit basketball before she’d finished school, after a terrifying episode that put her in a psychiatric ward, writes LINDA PEARCE.
An exceptional young talent with a famous basketball surname, Anneli Maley quit basketball before she had even finished school. That’s what she told her broken younger self, anyway: that she would never play again.
A fixture in national teams since her early teens, Maley was 15 when she moved to the Australian Institute of Sport. The daughter of NBL 270-gamer Paul Maley, now Basketball Australia’s executive general manager, she was 17 and back home in Melbourne when she was admitted to a psychiatric ward from the emergency department after another panic attack that had mirrored the physical symptoms of a cardiac arrest.
Shaking. Racing heart. Blurred vision. Fainting.
During that distressing period, while also trying to complete Year 12, she was on bed rest for a while, housebound for months, estranged from basketball for over a year and stricken with overwhelming anxiety in any social setting from the classroom to the supermarket to the bus stop.
Maley had returned from Canberra in a terrible state. Then things got even worse.
“I spent, I think, five days in a psych ward at the hospital just pretty much because physically and mentally I had to be monitored,” Maley says.
“Physically I was really thin and I was really weak and I wasn’t eating because I was depressed, so I didn’t have the right nutrients, and I was on a drip.’’
A little more than six years later, the versatile Bendigo Spirit small forward is an MVP contender at around the halfway point of the WNBL season, leading the competition in rebounds (again – this time averaging 15.4 per game), while ranking an unfamiliar second in scoring (average 19.1 points) as well.
Armed with anti-depressants and stronger coping mechanisms, she is open and vocal about her personal struggles and the need to talk about mental health. That includes sexuality, for her own positive experiences since coming out are not, she knows, the same stories of support and acceptance that everyone can tell.
Maley is also a budding Opal, having been among the 18 players invited to a selection camp in January. While failing to make the cut for the current FIBA Women’s World Cup qualifying tournament in Serbia, she learnt plenty and was thrilled just to be there for the first time.
Representing her country at senior level, whether in the traditional format (with Sydney hosting the main event in September, and the Opals thus guaranteed a place) or 3x3 (she was in the extended squad that attempted to qualify for Tokyo) is a huge ambition, but Paris 2024, for example, remains far from her thoughts.
Setting long-term goals is not something that tends to work for her, the 23-year-says.
Which may have something to do with her past.
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The Maleys were one of those sporty families where kids were constantly ferried to games and training and where, at home, everything was a competition, from Uno to who could be first to the end of the street.
American-born Paul originally came to Australia to play with the Westside Melbourne Saints, expecting to stay for nine months. That was more than 30 years ago, his decade-plus at four NBL clubs having included the 1994 championship at the North Melbourne Giants in a famous partnership with fellow import Darryl McDonald. Wife Karianne played state level junior basketball here and graduated from the US College system but decided against trying to pursue a WNBL career.
Anneli is their middle child and only girl. The three Maley kids would play one-on-one basketball in the front yard growing up. When they get together, still do.
“That was definitely something Anneli thrived on,’’ Paul recalls. “Her brother Marty always had an advantage being two years older, but if it ever turned nasty you could see exactly what was going on because Marty had a frightened look on his face and Anneli had a ferocious look on her face.
“You were scared for Marty, not for Anneli.’’
No wonder. “Yeah. I was a bit meaner, I think,’’ she smiles. “Especially when we were playing one-on-one, as soon as I’d start losing, I’d go to the more physical route, whereas he was too nice for that.’’
Also an elite volleyballer, Anneli was told by a teacher at Eltham High School that she would wear herself out if she kept trying to do it all. For someone who had made her first national team as a 14-year-old, basketball was not so much a choice as an inevitability.
“It was never really a decision. I was like, ‘Oh, of course, I’m just gonna play basketball. That’s just kind of how it rolls’.’’
As, through the ranks, did Maley herself. Always a phenomenal rebounder for her size and a fierce defender, she played for the Sapphires at the under 17 world championships in 2014, averaging 5.9 points and 11.4 boards despite often conceding up to 10cm. With current Opal Ezi Magbegor, she was one of the youngest members of the Gems team that won bronze the next year at the under 19 worlds in Russia, and her first year or so at the Centre of Excellence in Canberra went well enough.
Until everything unravelled.
“For some people the AIS can be a really great environment and it can breed a lot of success, and for me it was the opposite,’’ she says. “I had never struggled with confidence issues before that, and all of a sudden I was put in an environment where I’m being told to compare myself to other people every day.
“I understand that it’s necessary for you to always want to strive to be better to be a professional athlete, but what wasn’t instilled in me enough, I think, in my early athletic years was that while you’re doing that you also need to be content with where you are, otherwise you’re never going to enjoy any of the process.
“You can’t always be striving to be better or to do more without losing your way of where you are right now, and I think that’s why the AIS wasn’t a great environment for me.
“I’ve always been a hard worker, and I’ve always put in the extra effort, but I was never satisfied with where I was, and that can be my biggest strength and my biggest weakness at the same time, you know?’’
Maley’s mental health issues, she can see now, stemmed from not having a sense of self outside basketball, especially when she entered the awkward space between gun junior and wannabe pro. Didn’t know who she was. Looked in the mirror and didn’t understand or like what she saw.
Bruised ego meet identity crisis.
She would look up to the likes of Steph Talbot, Penny Taylor and Jenna O’Hea, and want to be them. Only later, with the help of sports psychologist Jacqui Louder, whom she credits with saving her life, did the realisation come that she could just try to add the best parts of those players and their games to her own. And still be Anneli Maley. For she was enough.
But what a process that was.
“When I say that my lows were low, I was real low. I was diagnosed with depression and then a panic disorder, and then I had some pretty aggressive bouts of anxiety disorder at the same time,’’ Maley says. “So it was a struggle figuring out all of that stuff at the age of 16. It was really difficult.’’
She left the AIS in October, 2016. Did not walk back into a basketball stadium or touch a ball until December, 2017.
“I thought I’d just come home and take a month off, and then once I got home I really kind of spiralled and fell really deep into that depressive cycle. My panic attacks got really, really bad, and the last thing I could do was pick up a basketball. It wasn’t just mentally that I wasn’t ready; physically I wasn’t capable, either.’’
The “pillars” that now support her sense of self extend to being an artist, sister, daughter, partner, friend, lover of dogs and nature. Far healthier and sturdier foundations built during the extended period away from so much she had known.
“I found some other things that I also fell in love with. So I was like, ‘You know what? I’d be happy if I never played basketball again’ and that was so important for me in that year to find myself as a person outside of basketball. I was so happy and I was enjoying everything I was doing.’’
It was when everything else was finally in place that she suddenly realised she missed the game and wanted to play again, even if her ever-supportive dad was doubtful, initially.
“I was not immediately ecstatic when she said she wanted to play basketball again,” Paul recalls.
“I just wanted her to be happy and I was worried that that was too much of a source of the problems that she ran into.”
Yet he also saw the positively-changed Anneli soon enough, which was just as well, as the next part came in a rush. Box Hill Senior Secondary College’s older students were away on an American tour, so, at Maley’s request, coach Trevor Burnette threw a bunch of Year 9 and 10 students together with the recovered Year 12 star and entered the team into the national schools championships that December. They won. She loved it.
A week later, the mid-season Adelaide Lightning recruit had suited up in the WNBL under her former Sapphires coach Chris Lucas, forever grateful for the part Lucas and others in SA played in rekindling her passion for the game.
After US college stints in Oregon and Texas, she returned home to complete a Bachelor of Arts in graphic and digital design and resume her national league career in 2019. Healthy, happy, wiser, and comfortable in her own skin.
It was also during her time in Adelaide that she started a new romantic relationship. “I called dad and I was like, ‘Hey, I have to tell you something, I’m dating a girl’, and he was like, ‘Oh that’s great, cool.’ I was like, ‘Aren’t you sad?’, and he said, ‘No, I was kinda waiting for it. We kinda knew’. And that was the most it was ever spoken about,’’ says Maley, whose partner of four years is current Lightning guard Marena Whittle.
“I’m very fortunate that I’ve always been surrounded by people who have made me feel supported with my sexuality … It really breaks my heart when I hear stories of otherwise, but that’s another thing about being an openly gay female basketball player that does help: I have had those conversations with later-teen kids and even some of my teammates about what that means to be true to yourself.
“That’s something I always think is tied up within mental health, just being honest about who you are.’’
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Maley got her first tattoo when she was 18, not long after returning to basketball. A lioness jumping through ferns. “That was something that I did to kind of claim my own space and claim my own sense of self again.’’
The bigger piece starts on her back. A family tree with her parents’ and siblings’ names in Morse code underneath another lioness. “That represents me and my ties to my family and my courage and stuff like that. It’s wrapped up in a cherry blossom, which is for new beginnings, and it branches out onto my arm.
“I always say to my dad, ‘I add to it every time I go through a big life change’. And he’s like, ‘Sweetie, you’ll have no space left.’ ‘Yeah, that’s my point. My body is my map of my life’.’’
It has led her to Bendigo Spirit, via Southside Flyers and the Sydney Uni Flames, and gone so quickly, these three years. Or maybe it’s four. Maley laughs that she’s not even sure.
Nor is she overthinking her basketball these days, having spent 18 unhappy months at the AIS wondering who she was and why she was still doing something that no longer brought her joy. But all of it, she stresses, has amounted to more good times than bad.
“You learn to take the teams you don’t make and the minutes you don’t play and all of that stuff as just part of being a professional athlete. Every year I’m taking on a new lesson. At college I didn’t play a whole lot. At Southside I was a backup to some brilliant Opals. Then I got my run at Sydney, but I wouldn’t have been prepared for that run at Sydney if I hadn’t have done my time of upsets.’’
She has never played better than this season, as a key signing for the 2-7 Spirit. Paul Maley agrees, having seen skills and abilities that have always been there, honed by years of hard work, now melded with a newfound self-belief and willingness to take risks. Just because you’ve missed the last few shots, he says, doesn’t mean that the next few won’t go in.
“It’s sort of been coming,’’ he adds. “Some of it is a matter of time. I mean, she’s still only 23, so I think there’s just a bit of maturity. She’s got this unique ability to rebound, and is just an elite level competitor in terms of possessions and the unbelievable effort she gives all the time.
“So that’s been both a blessing and a curse, I think. It’s a blessing in that it’s a fantastic base and it’s made her a valuable player at a WNBL level since an early age.
“And yet it’s also then on the mental side of the game been a safe place, to always just sort of go back to ‘well, I’ll just do this’, and instead she’s doing all the work to develop the skills and to become more of an offensive threat, and to take that leap to put it all together, it’s been the coolest thing to see.’’
Anneli agrees that offensively has been her area of greatest improvement. Which in turn has come from the mind. “That is just self-belief and mindset. I’ve always done extra work, I’ve always done extra ‘indies’ (individual sessions), and I’ve not always had the performances to be able to show that.
“I had years where I was really struggling to put my offensive game together, but I just never stopped working at it and I’m still working at it now. I still think there’s so much room for me to grow in that space, and I want to continue to grow into being an even more holistic basketball player instead of a rebounder and a defender. I’m not done growing, I’m not done adding, I’m not done evolving.’’
Back to the rebounding, though, which the 189cm machine says is about relentless drive/effort/desire combining with skill in roughly equal measure. The latter half is about reading the flight time, the way the ball comes off the ring, knowing where she needs to be, and being well enough prepared to have watched and worked out how individual opponents miss.
“I am amazed watching her,’’ Maley senior says. “She’s got all of the attributes and then the effort is just incredible. To be a rebounder of that level you’ve got to have great hands, timing, read the flight of the ball, and you’ve got to do the work to position yourself and fight for space, etc.
“But then what she brings is she increases her odds because she never takes a possession off. Every single shot that goes up she is … giving herself a chance at a rebound.’’
Like father, like daughter? Does he see anything of himself in Anneli? “Ah, I’d like to think so,’’ he adds, but as a compliment, not a boast. “I thought I was a pretty physical and competitive player; I think she takes that to a much higher level than I ever did.
“And I would still like to see myself as versatile and she’s definitely that. She can literally play three positions on the court and she can probably defend four, so her versatility and competitiveness and athleticism, I’d like to think I had a degree of those things. But not the same degree as what she has.’’
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Anneli Maley did not expect ever to be invited to an Opals camp. To her, it means representing every player who has ever pulled on the precious jersey, including the childhood idols of whom she now has a far more balanced and self-aware view.
“It was just a kind of euphoric feeling, I guess, to be there,” she says. “I can’t really put it into words because it was such an experience. I was like a sponge and I was just soaking up everything around me. It was just a whirlwind and a really awesome experience and I’ve been watching the games they’ve been playing over in Serbia, and it’s such a talented team, I’m just excited to have gone to that camp.’’
The feedback from coach Sandy Brondello was overwhelmingly positive, too. “She said she loved the way that I hustled and gave so much energy and my defensive effort and my rebounding; those were the things that she wanted me to continue to do.
“But work on the things that I know I already need to work on, which is to develop my guard skills, and continue to grow as an offensive player more consistently, and that’s a space that I’m already working on, so I felt like we were on the same page.’’
She is determined to stay in the moment, though, looking no further than trying to help the Spirit finish the season strongly, starting against the Townsville Fire on Thursday.
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“At the moment I’m just gonna say that I hope basketball continues to take me on an enjoyable path. I don’t know where that is, or where I want to be in the future. All I know is that right now I’m enjoying playing and I’m enjoying what I do every day and that’s the point, isn’t it?’’
An understanding that has come a little too late to help her younger self, to whom she would say just this: “Be unapologetically who you are and find out what that means. To figure out who you are, with basketball and without it. To add more to your sense of self than just being an athlete and kinda roll with that.’’
– If you or someone you know is impacted by depression, or experiencing suicidal thoughts or feelings, contact the Lifeline crisis line on 13 11 14. In an emergency, call 000.
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