Alex Rance's latest creation: a schoolEmma Quayle
The Age
25 August 2016Alex Rance has never had much trouble thinking up things to do with his time away from the Richmond back line. He's tried pilot training. He's designed phone apps. He is working one day a week in a real estate office seeing how things are done. "My problem has never been coming up with the ideas," he said. "My problem is, 'OK, that's done, what's next?' And people having to say to me, 'Hang on, come back, we're not finished yet!'"
Rance's latest project has been the most complex; it is not what your average footballer sets about doing on his days off. This idea came to him late last year, when he and a long-time friend were talking about their school days, agreeing that there were times when they had felt disengaged and like they weren't learning as much as they could or should have been. From there they started to wonder: could they create a school of their own?
That was the end of last year; Rance's latest "hobby" has grown into much more than that in the months since. He and his two business partners have rented space for two classrooms in Essendon, which will be ready to go for the start of the next school year. They're close to appointing their first teacher, and securing access to an oval and gym. They have had around 60 expressions of interest in "The Academy" via their new website, from prospective students as well as some parents, and will start interviewing candidates soon.
"We were planning to start with one class for the first year, but we're thinking now that we might go to 50 students and make it two," Rance said. "There's been interest coming from Tasmania, from South Australia, from Western Australia. It's been amazing, so far."
The Academy will be largely focused on football, of course. That's his area of expertise; you'll need to be playing it to get in. Rance knows they won't be attracting the top kids in the draft, but likes to think the school might help get someone onto a rookie list, or be picked higher up the order than they might have been. He has one of the Tigers' high performance coaches on board, to design and deliver the strength and conditioning program, and the students will slowly add to what he calls a "digital CV" documenting their physical development in their two years at the school.
He has put as much thought, if not more, into the other things he wants them to learn. And how he hopes they will learn it. The school will take students in for years 11 and 12, and they'll graduate with a Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning as well as a more specialised Academy one. The friend Rance first workshopped the idea with, Luke Surace, is in charge of development and delivery, and the school will be a paperless one, where the students work on iPads. "We've done a lot of research into the attention span of kids and it's getting shorter and shorter," Rance said. "We need punchier delivery, more videos, shorter sessions. We want to be more engaging."
He and Surace have taken all their ideas to their third partner, Casey Helman, who has experience in secondary school auditing and is making sure the things they want to do can be done, complying with government regulations. "It's Alex's brainchild, so he'll say, 'Can we do this, and can we do that?' and we'll talk it through and work out which requirements we need to meet," she said. "We mould it until we get it right, so we can get everything ticked off on."
Rance has split his ideas into three basic modules: education, passion, and personal. The first covers the basics: English; maths and so on. The second one is about getting kids to think about what they care most about – football, music, web design, whatever – so that they have something to strive for and feel motivated by. The third is about understanding themselves and how they think and learn. "I think that's one thing parents really want," he said. "They want their kid to be motivated and self aware and just be a good person in the community."
Rance's own motivation in the past has been simple: his ideas have been about fun, money, or a combination of both. This one feels much different. As he has grown as a footballer, he has enjoyed finding ways to pass the things he has learnt onto his younger teammates, and the thought of being able to communicate those things more broadly and help other people makes him feel good.
"I went through a process last year of thinking, 'If I finish football now, what skills do I have?'" he said. "I thought I had none, but there's so many skills we develop as players that you either don't think about or take for granted. The realisation that you have something of value to pass on is very rewarding and that's what I'm looking forward to, passing on some knowledge and watching the kids progress over the two years. It will be as beneficial for me as it is for them, I hope."
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/richmond-defender-alex-rances-latest-creation-a-school-20160824-gr03hh.html
