They forged a bond before the demise of the Canberra Cannons and now basketball duo Frank Arsego and Glenn Baird are teaming up with the Canberra Raiders to help young athletes cope with professional sport.
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The Raiders are backing Arsego and Baird's SportsLife IQ to assist their junior and NRL players with life on and off the field.
The Raiders and SportsLife IQ officially struck up a partnership in mental health week.
Rising halfback Mitch Cornish and Anthony Milford have already been put through the program. Arsego and Baird will ramp up their involvement with the Green Machine next year.
Their work is aimed at helping athletes of all sports find a balance in their life, running self-esteem and resilience programs, and suicide awareness programs.
Arsego and Baird have also started talks with the ACT Brumbies. Former Cannons assistant coach and AIS head coach Arsego hoped the program would give athletes an "edge" in their bid to be the best.
"But it's not just performance, it's holistic. That's where the challenge is for everyone in the sport industry," Arsego said.
"We really wanted to create a proactive model ... we don't want to solve problems, we want to give athletes the skills to understand things happen and do they have the capacity to seek help."
The pair will work with Raiders coach Ricky Stuart and education and welfare officer Dean Souter to add the program to the club's training schedule for next season.
The business has been a long-term project of research before Arsego and Baird started working with the Raiders' under-16 and under-18 teams this year.
After their sessions, the Raiders junior players reported a 24 per cent increase in suicide awareness, and 34 per cent in knowing how to improve self-esteem and resilience when compared to the junior NRL control group.
It prompted Souter to expand the involvement at the Raiders to take the club "ahead of the curve" in offering the best programs for players' mental welfare.
Arsego and Baird have previously worked with the Sydney Swans Academy, at the request of then-coach Paul Roos, and Basketball Victoria.
Their first invitation to join the Raiders came through Andrew Dunemann when he was the under-20s coach.
"There's a lot of suicide awareness programs being run in the game at the moment, but we wanted to take it a notch higher than what the NRL are doing," Souter said.
"The Canberra kids are getting training in how to identify and deal with situations. Now there will be a component for the [under-20s] and the NRL squads as well.
"I think we're ... a bit ahead of others at the moment. And the thing that separates this program from others, for me, is that they give an awareness of it, but they also get strategies and tools to help someone else."
Arsego and Baird have worked together in basketball teams for more than a decade. Baird is also a registered psychologist.
"We want active participation to encourage learning," Baird said.
"I look at my career and think 'if I had this stuff when I was 18 ... it could have been different'. Simple things like handling conflict or talking to a coach when you're going through a slump.
"Back when I was playing, that support didn't exist. But it does make a difference. Over the years we wondered why sport wasn't talking about mental health and wellbeing."
