Life’s a beach for Olympic bronze medallist Amy Atwell.
Water has been a constant in her life, from happy childhood memories in Western Australia to a college career which ended in a pandemic anchoring her to Hawaii to Perth’s beaches through the height of summer.
“I feel like when I go to the beach and am in the ocean nothing else matters,” the Perth Lynx star says.
“Especially during college, I felt like I could go to the beach and switch off everything else – not think about basketball or school just soak in the sun, be in the water and present with whoever is there with me.
“I still feel like that to this day.”
That love of the water first formed when Atwell was in primary school.
“I grew up in South Perth, the nearest beach was Cottesloe about half an hour away but my grandparents lived in Jurien Bay up north, which is two and half/three hours out of Perth,” she explains.
“They had a house on the beach, we would go up there every school holidays and I’d literally spent all day, every day at the beach. During the school term it was all about school and basketball but the school holidays were spent at the beach.
“When I went to college in America, I was 10 minutes from the beach my whole six years in Hawaii. Every single off day, as a team, we’d spend it at the beach, any chance we had we’d be there. In my last year, when I was in grad school, all my classes were at night, from 6-9pm, we’d train in the afternoons from 2pm onwards, so the mornings were free and if I wasn’t studying, I was at the beach.
“I got stuck in Hawaii for Covid, so we lived outside – we’d be at the beach, hiking, I learned how to surf and was surfing three times a week.”
The pandemic kept Atwell in the US, away from family and friends. for two years.
“Everything shut down in the middle of our conference tournament and I had two or three days to make a decision where I was going to be stuck – if I stayed, I’d probably be stuck but if I came back to Australia I might have got stuck there and not been able to come back to college,” she recalls.
“If I went home, I’d have to quarantine and at that stage didn’t know how long for and not be able to leave Australia again. My best friend was from Oregon, and we decided to stay in Hawaii because we had a house. It was a tough decision because I didn’t know when I’d be able to go back to Australia and it ended up being two years between going home.
“Being an island, it was easy to isolate, there were no flights in and out so the numbers were lower. School and basketball got shut down, we got to live pretty normally but a bit later it got stricter.”
The silver lining was learning to ride a wave.
“So many people had given me crap for not knowing how to surf because I was from Australia and had lived in Hawaii for three years so Covid was the perfect time to start,” Atwell says.
“A few of my friends and I all decided to do it and we were surfing three or four times a week.
“I haven’t surfed since I came back to Australia, the basketball schedule is so hectic and doesn’t really permit sometimes, but I’d like to get back into it, especially here in Perth.
“I love the ocean and it’s a good form of fitness as well, a good work out.”
