WORDS Tim Kroenert

Australian rules footballer Jared Crouch says sharing your gifts to help others is doing God’s work.

When it comes to the love-hate relationship between the media and professional sport, Sydney Swans midfielder Jared Crouch doesn’t mince words. ‘I despise the media’, he says. ‘The media is the most powerful thing in the world, yet it has no desire to do good.’

I hope Australian Catholics is excepted. Nonetheless, Crouch has a point. Footy headlines are generally dominated by ‘players behaving badly’ type stories. It’s fallen heroes such as Wayne Carey and Ben Cousins, or even Crouch’s own team mate, ‘king-hitter’ Barry Hall, who attract the eye of media scrutiny.

‘The media wants the player who’s messing up’, says Crouch. ‘They want that player who’s doing the wrong thing. They’re a money-making business and they only want to sell papers. They don’t care about the goodness of the people out there.’

If the media nurtured any true desire to promote sports stars as good role models, says Crouch, all they need to do is look. I would add that as far as good role models go, you could find worse than Crouch himself.

A quiet achiever and consummate professional, the 30-year-old has been placed in the top 10 of the Swans’ best and fairest count six times during his decade-long run on the team’s seniors list, and played every game in the Swans’ 2005 premiership-winning season.

Crouch is proud of his Catholic faith and is fully invested in everything he does, and that’s equally true away from the turf of the SCG.

‘The demands on me as a footballer are high’, he says. ‘You’ve got a whole lot of training to do, a lot of hours. A lot of people want your time. But I know no other way. I came straight out of school into this environment.

‘The idea of being a well-rounded person is very important, although what other people see as balanced and what you see as balanced can be different things. It wouldn’t matter what I was doing. I’d still live a life with a balance of friends, family and faith.’

Better add community work to that list. Crouch is one of the coordinators of Team Swans, which encompasses a range of community programs that the Sydney players are involved with, including hospital visitation among other forms of charity work.

The flagship of Team Swans is a program called Healthy Choices, where players go into schools with the aim of teaching students about making the right choices in life. That includes everything from physical health and nutrition to more holistic life factors.

‘Healthy Choices is talking to kids about the right choices to make, and equally the wrong ones,’ says Crouch. ‘An easy example is the foods you eat—you can choose to have a lolly, or you can choose to have a piece of fruit.

‘On top of all that, we look at the type of friend you are, and the type of friends you surround yourself with. Friends play a big part in shaping your life. The choices you make have a lot to do with the type of friend you are, and the type of friends you surround yourself with. We discuss what makes a good friend.

‘We also talk about goal-setting, and share our own experiences—the challenges you face and the goals you set to be able to live your dream.’

Crouch’s journey, and the challenges he’s faced along the way to achieving a career as a professional footballer, were underpinned by his Catholic faith. In particular, his pursuit of athletic excellence was founded in a belief in the need to cultivate God-given talents.

‘I’m the eldest of five boys. I grew up in a Catholic family. I went to a Christian Brothers’ school’, he says. ‘When I talk about my faith, there’s a terrific Bible story that always comes through, about the master who had three servants and gave each of them talents.’

According to the story, two of the servants invest and multiply their talents, while the third, much to the master’s chagrin, keeps his hidden away. The story spoke to young Jared, who initially understood it as an affirmation of his individual gift.

‘When I was young I used to spend a lot of my time thanking God for allowing me to play sport well’, he recalls. ‘But as I got older, I saw the great joy people got from what I did. I realised your talents aren’t actually for you. They’re for everybody else. You have to develop them to the best of your ability so that other people are able to enjoy them.

‘And that may be simply by people coming to watch you play football, or it may be that you go to a hospital and visit sick kids. It might be just saying g’day to a fan in the street. Just by doing those happy pleasant things to people, it gives them a great deal of joy.

‘Jesus did that’, he adds. ‘He used his talents for other people. He brought excitement and happiness to other people. He spoke to people who everyone else frowned upon. He didn’t discriminate. That’s how I try to live my life.’