LEAGUE STAR BRINGS MENTAL FITNESS CONCEPT TO CHANGE ROOMS

By TIM HOWARD

In the 1980s and 90s Paul Langmack was a rugby league star who won a first grade premiership with Canterbury in 1984 before he turned 20. He toured with 1986 Kangaroos, at 22 years and 22 days he was the youngest player to play 100 first grade games. He left Canterbury to play and later captain Western Suburbs. He became one of only five NRL players to play 100 games at two different clubs and finished his career in 1999 at Easts. With such a stellar career behind him, many would expect Langmack to find a nice job commenting on the game in the media.

Instead he has spent the last four years taking his vision of bringing a concept he calls “mental fitness” to rugby league change rooms around NSW.

Last Thursday it was the turn of the South Grafton Rebels where players from 11 years to seniors spent 30 minutes in group sessions learning what it meant to work on mental fitness.

Langmack was stunned at the turn out of young players and turned the J J Lawrence cricket nets into his consulting room where he took teams of players in their age groups aside to plant the seed of his concept in their minds.

Listening into a session, Langmack didn’t pull punches. He told of his experiences, like people he went to school with ending up in jail, how he battled a cancer diagnosis, low times in his playing career when success didn’t come his way and how getting his mind mentally fit allowed him to get through the tough times to a place where he could enjoy life.

Langmack said he was not a fan of the term, “mental health”.

“When you tell players you’re going to talk about mental health, they think you’re going to tell them there is something wrong with them,” he said.

“You get to a session on it. The people that are there are not tuned in and don’t want to participate because they feel they might be singled out.”

Instead Langmack champions the idea of people using his sessions to learn techniques to become get their minds fitter to handle the stresses of competitive sport and by extension, life at work, home and play.

Langmack said he tailored his presentations to deal with issues confronting nearly all young people: depression, anxiety, bullying, suicide prevention and addiction.

“We’ve developed the sessions so we bring all these topics up,” he said. “And we’ve tailored them developmentally for different age groups to make sure we tackle them in age-appropriate ways.”

His assistant, Josie Valenti, said this was the fourth season of taking the program on the road and it was evolving all the time.

“This year’s program is the first time we’ve talked about how young people can develop techniques to get them out of situations they might find themselves in,” she said.

“Up to now we’ve been looking at types of situation, like bullying, addictions, low selfesteem you can find yourself in.

“Now we’re trying to get to putting ideas in people’s head about how they might get out of them.”

Langmack heaped praise on the Rebels for getting so many local community services to become involved.

“When we leave town, these groups can step in and offer their services to people who have come along today,” he said.

“So many times we’re told, It’s great you’re here, there’s nothing locally for us’.

“But as you can see here today, there are stack of groups offering different services to back up what we’re doing.”

Grafton Headspace community engagement officer Claudia Ollenburg was one who “got” the concept of

DAMNN HUNT goes off with a bang

The first ever DamnN HUNT held in the World has finished in the Northern Rivers area of NSW with almost 1900 of the sports team logos and players collected over the 2 days.

The hunt dropped some 1500 ‘pins’ (team logos and players) on Saturday and the same amount on Sunday but in different locations.

mental fitness.

“This group, kids aged from 11-16, this is where we can make contact with them,” she said.

“As a group they’re right into the idea of physical fitness and they get they have to work at that.

“It’s not a big jump from there to the idea you can work on your mental fitness and improve that too.”

The groups involved on Thursday are:

The local services who will be available at the program are:

• RAMHP (Rural Adversity Mental Health Program)

• Bulgarr Ngaru

• Grafton Community Mental Health Service

• Momentum Collective-Clear Minds (Child & Youth Services)

• Headspace

• Stand By Support After Suicide

• Clarence Valley Council - Youth Community

• Development Officer

• Westpac Bank Rebels event organiser Janita Cooper was excited by the event, which was swamped with young football players.

“It was great to see so many here and even if we just help one overcome issues in their life, it will be worth it,” she said.

With the hunt starting at 9am and going for 12 hours each day, people were seen roaming around sports fields, streets, parks, the beach and others places to find a logo.

Owner of the hunt Duncan Smith said that he was very happy with the hunt that saw around 700 people from cities and towns like Lismore, Mullumbimby, Byron Bay, Ballina, Murwillumbah, Tweed Heads, Casino and others joined up to play.

“Yes to have around 700 people playing the game and collect logos and players was great to see. It is all a bit of fun and after collecting the logos people can do what they want with them. All in all around $1.8 million was collected and people can now keep these logos and players and watch the price go up and down in sportstrade, just like they would do on a stock market or sell them and get the money”.

“There was around $4,000 in free money found over the two days along with players that included Lewis Hamilton, LeBron James and Lionel Messi”

Smith said the next hunt will be in Queensland with the location to be revealed in the next few days but he did say that it would be a regional area.

“On the weekend we will reveal where the next hunt Is going to take place, but what I can tell you is that it is going to be in regional Queensland for sure. What I can say is that the next hunt will be on the 1st and 2nd of April and be in the order of around $2 million in value, so it is worth downloading the app and getting out and about to find the logos. It is completely free to play and some people collected 15 logos in less than an hour worth around $1,200 value based on the price of that logo in sportstrade last weekend. Not bad for a bit of fun out in the fresh air I would say”.