The Binar Futures basketball team is lighting a spark in a generation of young Indigenous kids

It looks just like a normal basketball game in suburban Australia, but for these kids, there’s so much more at stake.

The sun has just risen on a cold, wet morning when Adam Desmond pulls into the car park of his Perth dry-cleaning business.

In the back of his van are bags of dirty basketball jerseys — evidence of a week away from home running kids sports tournaments.

“It’s been a challenge to balance,” Adam says as he flicks on washing machines.

“But I enjoy coming in early and starting my day this way.”

After a couple of hours, Adam climbs back into his van and makes the short trip down the road to his second gig — the basketball charity he’s deeply passionate about.

On the surface, Binar Futures is a basketball club. It runs its own league, holds school clinics and runs training sessions four nights a week.

But the organisation is so much more.

It takes the interest many Aboriginal kids have in basketball and uses that to create better health, cultural and education outcomes.

“I’d say 99 per cent of the kids come into Binar initially for basketball,” Adam says.

But after that introduction, they are soon exposed to other things to get involved in.

Adam likens using basketball as a gateway to other important programs — such as homework or cultural sessions — to pairing boring vegetables with a delicious food kids like.

“If you just said, ‘Oh, we’re just starting a program, and it’s going to be after school [and] after you do your seven hours of school, we’re going to keep you back for another two hours and do more sort of schoolwork’ — most kids are not going to volunteer to do that,” he says.

But now there’s a waiting list of kids hoping to join.

Road trip

About 5,000 children have taken part in Binar’s programs, a far cry from its humble beginnings in 2011.

Back then, Adam was helping run a program called Night Hoops, which also used basketball to divert at-risk youth from antisocial behaviour.

But they weren’t regular sessions, and Adam was worried the kids would lose focus.

He decided to take some of those kids and enter them in a basketball league in another part of Perth.

Adam acted as the team manager and coach, but also the bus driver, collecting five boys each week for games.

“The first [car ride], I still remember, was very, very quiet,” he says with a smile.

Originally, starting the basketball team was just that — providing an opportunity for the kids to continue doing something they enjoyed.

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But Adam quickly saw other benefits.

“I knew some of the family struggles that some of the kids had been going through,” he says.

“It was a chance for them to have something in their life that had had some structure to it, and something that they were enjoying.”

As that season progressed, the car rides became as important as the basketball.

“The conversations change,” he says.

“It becomes ‘what’s happening in life?’, ‘what’s happening at school’? It was a trusted space.

Poor decisions

Adam knows first hand how easy it is for kids to veer down the wrong path.

“I grew up in a home that was really good. I had loving parents. I had a home to go to,” he says.

“But I went through a teenage phase where I chose to just couch hop, live at friends’ houses. I remember sleeping in train carriages or newspaper bins.

“I was making poor decisions, we all were, and we were doing things that were leading me to a path of going to jail or ending up dead.”

When Adam was 16, he applied for a job at a dry-cleaner.

He was hired, but continued living his life as before.

“I was still doing illegal activities outside of work, but I was transitioning a little bit,” he says.

“What actually changed it for me was … my girlfriend at the time ended up becoming pregnant.

“That was when I thought, ‘well, I have to just completely change my life’.

“[I] quit alcohol, any drugs, anything like that, straight away.

Now with a steady job, Adam decided to branch out and purchase his own dry-cleaning business in 2003, before upgrading to his current shop in Midland four years later.

But by 2014, Binar was effectively another full-time job.

Adam says it’s only through the support of his family, who help out at the dry-cleaner, that he’s able to juggle both.

“They really supported the Binar work I was doing, and really always encouraged that,” Adam says.

“No matter how the business was going, I was able to try and balance that the best I can and fill both roles.”

WARNING: For Indigenous readers, this portion of the story contains the image and name of an Indigenous person who has died, published with permission of their family.

Tragedy strikes

The organisation has enjoyed a lot of success, but it’s faced heartbreaking setbacks as well.

The biggest was in 2022, when teenager Cassius Turvey was attacked when walking home from school. He later died in hospital.

Cassius was a Binar basketball player and considered a leader in his community.

“My daughter was very close friends with Cassius,” Adam says.

“Someone had contacted me and said he’d been attacked, and Cassius had gone to hospital.

“I didn’t want to tell [my daughter], because I wanted to wait until we get back home, and at that stage we didn’t know it was life threatening.”

Cassius was initially released from hospital, but had a seizure hours later and was put into a coma.

Adam took his daughter and some other children to see him.

“It was a really tough thing to walk into that space knowing how serious it actually was,” he says.

“I still remember Mechelle Turvey [Cassius’ mum] being in there, and despite her own grief and what she was going through, just wrapped her arms around the kids, took them to his bedside.

Much of the grief and anger was in Midland, and Adam credits Mechelle with helping avert community backlash.

“I think there was a real risk of things spiralling really badly,” he says.

“I think Mechelle done an amazing job of selflessly putting her own trauma aside to get everyone to kind of wrap their arms around each other and support each other through it.

“We see things often that happen in community that really divide … and this was something I feel really brought a community even closer together.”

Adam saw the Binar kids struggle with their grief.

“Some … struggled immensely through that time, and some still do,” he says.

“That group of kids lost their leader … the person that they really looked to and guided them.”

Forging a new path

Binar, which is the Noongar word for meteor, is almost unrecognisable from the one-man-band it started out as.

Now with full-time staff and an office, Adam struggles to quantify the impact its had.

“A lot of people would come and say, ‘oh, you’re doing amazing things for these kids’,” he says.

“I really thought ‘well, I’m not really, I’m just taking them to basketball,’ and that was how I looked at it for a lot of years.”

But over time, he saw signs that his organisation was resulting in real change.

“I started seeing some of the breaking of cycles in families for some of these kids,” Adam says.

“Some of them were the first to graduate year 12, or some of them were first to get a full-time job.

“It was really five or six years down the track where I could really start to see some of the kids and what they were doing, and then that they were becoming leaders in their own community.”

Adam has lofty ambitions for what Binar Futures can achieve, if he can attract the external funding needed.

He wants to be in more schools and communities.

He wants a sports complex base to run programs from.

He also wants to enter a team in the Western Australian Basketball League’s junior competition, and see Aboriginal kids achieve their sporting dreams.

As Adam looks to the future, he draws from his past.

“If I didn’t go through what I did as a teenager, I wouldn’t be able to connect with some of the kids that are facing similar things,” he says.

“When I look at my group of really close friends from back then — and I have the utmost respect for all of them, they’ve all been such a significant part in shaping my life.

“But I really feel sad for the struggle that some have gone through.

“My motivation is to have as many kids as possible never, ever have anything in their life that’s going to cause any trauma and pain.”

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Credits

• Words: Tom Wildie
• Production: Greig Johnston
• Photography and video: Tom Wildie, Andrew Seabourne, Mitch Edgar, Aran Hart, Julian Robins, Nick Martyr, Glyn Jones