For one afternoon, the Redhawks girls’ basketball team left behind the land of Knights, Mavericks, and Titans to welcome a team from the land of kangaroos as the Aussie Travellers visited The Nest Thursday afternoon. 

Escaping with a 41-37 win, the game was about more than the final result for head coach Ross Reedy. 

“We’re just excited,” Reedy said. “I think every time we get an opportunity to play, different kinds of folks, whether we’re traveling within the state, within the continental U.S., which we did last year, And then any time we get to play an international opponent, which I believe this is the second or third time. It’s just exciting because one, you get to play people from a different place and have a different brand of basketball, but it also opens you up culturally.”

The Aussie Travellers is a summer program for basketball players looking for exposure in the United States and consists of players of all different ages and places in Australia. 

“So I did this tour last year, and just, like, loved every second of it, like the just like the experience of coming here,” Aussie Traveller Liv Johnston said. “It’s a whole different country, obviously, and whole new experiences. Everyone’s so nice. Like you going to a place we would just open the door for you, which I love. Just great people and a great country, and sports culture is really big here in America.”

Some Travellers hope the exposure to basketball outside of Australia will help them prepare for their future goals as players. For junior Lily Exton, that means going D1 in the United States. 

“I really want to go to a D1 college,” Exton said. “Playing a different type of community and the different girls and meeting different people and then see where that takes me hopefully far.”

In the U.S. basketball is considered a major sport with NBA, WNBA, and NCAA basketball bringing millions upon millions of viewers, but in Australia it is outshined by more culturally prominent sports like rugby or swimming. 

“Rugby is huge in Australia and we call it the AFL,” Johnston said. “So that’s kind of our main emphasis. It’s still big on basketball, but yeah, it’s definitely like the college scene right here is just amazing compared to home.”

For Travellers parent Alek Horenko, this trip and tour was about providing more serious basketball experiences. 

“So she’s always wanted to take her basketball a little bit more seriously,” Horenko said. “So in Australia, basketball is not one of the main sports, so we don’t train that much as some of the other ones. So we just saw at the end of high school to give her a chance to take it a little bit more seriously.”

With the game going down to the final minutes, the Redhawks felt there was no noticeable difference in their playing-style, but during their visit with the team from down under, some of the cultural differences stand out. 

“We’re talking about school, how different it is,” senior Anaiah Warrior said. “And like we had said that, our summer is three months and theirs is like two, and they were, like, freaking out whenever we said, it was three months. So you can tell that it’s a lot different for what they do in Australia, definitely culture shock.”