Why Regional Athletes Deserve Better and What I’m Doing About It
- Jul 9
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 13
Written by Arj Perera, High Performance Coach
Arj Perera is a staunch advocate for the progression of women's sport, having spent over 15 years as a high-performance coach in basketball and Volleyball at the elite levels. He is the founder of Human Mechanics Australia and The Brown Bear Coaches, providing high-performance coaching for elite and developing female athletes.
I didn’t grow up here in Bendigo. That’s worth saying upfront, because it changes the story. I moved to Bendigo about fifteen years ago, not born into this community, not raised watching regional sport from the sidelines. I arrived from the outside with fresh eyes. What I saw when I got here, I couldn’t unsee it. Still can’t. Regional athletes were being left behind. Not because they weren’t talented, not because they didn’t work hard, but because the infrastructure around them, the access, the facilities, the qualified coaching, just wasn’t there. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry to fix it. So I decided to.
Three hours in the car to train for one
Here’s what was actually happening when I arrived, athletes from Bendigo and surrounding areas who wanted proper strength and conditioning coaching were driving to Melbourne to get it. Two and a half, sometimes three hours each way, they’d sit in a fixed position for the drive down, train for an hour, then sit in that same fixed position for the drive home.
Think about that for a second, really think about it. Anyone who knows anything about developing performance will know that you’ve essentially undone the benefits of that session before you’ve even walked in the door at home. The body doesn’t just shrug off three hours in a car, that’s not how physiology works. Beyond the physical cost, there’s the time cost, a full day gone for one training session. That’s not sustainable for a teenage athlete (or the parents) managing school, family, and sport. It’s barely sustainable for anyone.
The buzzword problem nobody talks about
When I opened Human Mechanics, I thought the hardest part would be building the facility, finding athletes, and getting programs off the ground. It wasn’t. The hardest part was explaining what I actually did.
Strength and conditioning wasn’t a widely used term, if at all, in regional Victoria. Far too many people thought S&C Coach was just a fancy word for personal trainer, and without completely disrespecting an entire profession, we all know how inconsistent a large portion of PTs can be. Irrespective of that issue, I pressed on, and Human Mechanics was born. Within a short period of time, everyone knew who I was and, more importantly, what I actually did. The vision was turning into a reality.
Fast forward a decade or so, and a lot of fitness businesses are recognising the benefit of using S&C or High Performance as a tagline. In fact, everyone began using it, personal trainers, physios, exercise physiologists. You’d see it everywhere, on social media, on websites, in marketing. Look, I understand why. It sounds impressive, and it signals something that’s a little more special than just ‘strength training’. But here’s the thing, using the language isn’t the same as having the qualifications and the experience to back it up.
I’ll say this directly because it matters. It is genuinely outside of scope for physiotherapists and exercise physiologists to call themselves high-performance coaches. That’s not a dig at those professions, they do incredibly important work, but the scope is different, the training is different. More importantly, the experience required is completely different. An ASCA Level 3 Strength and Conditioning Coach with a Master’s degree in the same area and twenty years working inside elite sport environments is not the same thing as someone who completed a weekend course and rebranded their Instagram.
Parents and athletes in regional areas often had no real way of knowing the difference, and that’s a problem. Because if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you can end up paying for something that looks right but isn’t. Worse, you can end up with an athlete who gets hurt because the person designing their program didn’t actually know what they were doing.
Part of what I’ve spent fifteen years doing is educating. Not from a place of arrogance, just from a place of honestly believing that athletes deserve to know what they’re actually getting.
What’s changed, and what the numbers don’t tell you
Here’s the part I’m genuinely proud of. Something has shifted for regional athletes in Victoria over the last fifteen years. It’s not just human mechanics, there’s a small collective of properly qualified high-performance coaches spread across regional areas who’ve been quietly doing this work, but the results are real, and they’re visible.
Athletes from Bendigo are getting drafted to AFL and AFLW clubs, they’re earning college placements in the United States, they’re finding their way into national development programs, into the WNBL, into international competition. Some of the athletes who’ve trained at Human Mechanics have already played in or gone on to play in the WNBA.
Not because they suddenly got more talented, they were always talented. What changed was their access to the physical development their talent deserved. The athleticism, the strength, the movement quality, and injury resilience that separate athletes who make it from the ones who almost did.
That was always the gap, and that’s what I’ve spent fifteen years filling. Now, with the help of a passionate multidisciplinary team, it’s been a pretty amazing thing to be a part of and witness happening.
The part that still keeps me up at night
But I’d be doing a disservice if I sat here and told you the work was done, because there’s one group of regional athletes where the gap is still significant. Where the consequences are still real, and where the system is still, frankly, failing.
Our female athletes. Around sixty percent of girls drop out of sports by the time they reach adulthood. In regional areas, I’d put that number closer to seventy, and when you actually sit down and talk to these athletes, really talk to them, not at them, the reasons aren’t complicated. They’re just uncomfortable to hear.
My senior female athletes tell me the same three things over and over that keep getting overlooked but are absolutely key to ensuring our girls stay in sport.
The first is mastery. They need to see themselves getting better, and not just feel it in some abstract way, actually see it when they train and when they compete. A program that measurably builds their strength, their athleticism, their resilience, and then shows up in how they perform on the court or on the field. When a girl can feel the difference training has made, she stays. When she can’t, she doesn’t.
The second is community. Female athletes need to feel like they belong in the environment they’re training in, and here’s something I feel strongly about, you cannot take a men’s program, tweak a few sets and reps, and call it a female athlete program. That’s not what this means. It needs to be built for them, their sport, their position, their training age, and their specific physical needs. When the program feels like it was designed for someone else, athletes feel like an afterthought, and eventually, they begin to believe they don’t belong there.
The third is identity. They need to be treated as athletes. Full stop. Not as a secondary consideration, not as a footnote at the end of the boys’ session. As athletes, with their own development needs, their own goals, and their own potential that deserves to be taken seriously.
If they can see it, they can be it
At Human Mechanics, we’ve made a deliberate effort to make elite female sport visible to our local athletes. Not in a poster-on-the-wall kind of way. In a real, tangible, she’s-right-there kind of way.
Through my work with the Bendigo Spirit, the New Zealand Tall Ferns, and my consulting across NBL1, some of the best female athletes in the country, and honestly, some of the best in the world, have trained in our facility. Athletes who’ve represented their countries. Athletes who’ve gone on to the WNBA. When our local teenage girls can see those women training, can talk to them, can train alongside them, something shifts.
It’s that simple idea. If you can see it, you can be it. We’re not just telling our female athletes what’s possible. We’re showing them. Live. In person. In the same space. Lifting the same weights. That visibility does something no program design or marketing campaign ever could, it makes the dream feel real rather than distant.
What I want you to take from this
If you have a daughter playing sport in regional Victoria, any sport, here’s what I want you to know. The gap that existed when I arrived here fifteen years ago has narrowed. The pathway is better, and the access is better. What’s available in regional areas now compared to then is genuinely different, and it’s getting some exceptional results. But she still deserves more than she’s probably getting.
She deserves a program built specifically for her, not borrowed from the boys’ squad. She deserves coaches who understand female athlete development, not just general fitness. She deserves to train in environments where elite female athletes are visible and present, not abstract inspirations on a screen.
She deserves to know that the dropout rate isn’t her destiny. That seventy percent figure isn’t fate, it’s a failure of the systems around these athletes, not of the athletes themselves. We’ve been working on changing that for fifteen years. We’re not done yet.
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Read more from Arj Perera
Arj Perera, High Performance Coach
Empowering our female youth athletes to focus on their physical development and build strong, athletic, and resilient bodies has been Arj's primary focus over the last 15 years. With Conference and National Championships under his belt as well, he brings this knowledge and expertise to our most important athletes outside of National and Pro circuits - our youth.
