At just 15, Stavros Gelekis was at the top of his game. He was training like a professional, using his free time to practise tricks and basically called the West Adelaide Hellas pitch his second home.
His goal was to make it into the under 19s and he was already training in the seniors squad.
“Before I went into the under 19s I decided to do a really intense pre-season,” Stavros tells Neos Kosmos.
“All through my junior career I was really unfit, I was doing all this extra training and my fitness wasn’t improving.”
It seemed like an innocent problem, maybe he wasn’t training the right way?
Sadly the reality was much more terrifying and debilitating.
“I had a training session with West Adelaide and I remember running with the ball and then someone had tackled me. When I got up I started feeling really dizzy and I just collapsed,” Stavros tells Neos Kosmos. Taking a free kick, he soon realised his sight becoming blurry and that he was falling to the ground. Amazingly he remembers feeling embarrassed, thinking his fall would unnecessarily cause a commotion.
He had stopped breathing, and lay unconscious for minutes before his trainer Ross Scolari was able to resuscitate him. Stavros is here today thanks to the quick thinking of Mr Scolari and some unimaginably useful CPR lessons.
“The next thing I knew I woke up and there was the ambulance and I was being resuscitated by the trainer.”
That wasn’t the worst of it. Stavros endured what he calls the “longest six months of his life” after that.
Test after test, being forced away from the club he loved, Stavros had to stomach more than a diagnosis. He had to overcome a career changing prospect.
At the age of 15, Stavros was diagnosed with right ventricular tachycardia, an illness that stopped him right in his tracks.
“It’s a build up of scar tissue in my right ventricle which really short circuits the oxygen from getting from my heart to my lung,” he says.
There is no cure, and the best case scenario for sufferers is that it doesn’t progress.
Stavros has had multiple operations to fight it, but the diagnosis put an end to his playing career.
He tried to get back on the pitch, trained hard once again, but just two matches into the season in the under 17s, he blacked out again.
His life at the club changed. From a promising up and comer, he became a spectator.
“I used to go watch the first team play every Saturday and as much as I used to love watching them play it made me a little bit jealous,” he says.
He knew his heart and soul was at the club, and wanted to give back any way he could.
He plucked up the courage to ask his former coach and now club chairman Alex Alexandrou if he could contribute. Mr Alexandrou didn’t even have to think about it.
“Without doubt Stavros was the best player I have ever coached,” he said on West Adelaide’s Facebook.
Finding a spot for him was easy. For the past two years, Stavros, now 22, has been the coach of the West Adelaide Hellas under 14s.
Mr Alexandrou has never had to think twice about his appointment.
Stavros has coached the team promotion twice, and just this year helped ferry the team to their first ever championship win.
A modest man, he credits his talented group of teenagers as the real heroes of the season.
His philosophy is simple; coach in a way that will give the kids the same love he developed for the club.
“I know a lot of teams out there that are a lot about winning, and sometimes the kids don’t quite enjoy it and they don’t appreciate the game and they quit at a young age,” he says. “I just tell the kids to enjoy themselves.”
Next week, the club will present Stavros and his group of budding professionals with their championship cup.
A dream come true for Stavros.