Even a born winner like Cedric Jackson knows how rocky the road ahead is for the Illawarra Hawks, but that just fuels the fire as he looks to silence the doubters.
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The Hawks are bracing for a quick turnaround ahead of a clash with the Sydney Kings on Sunday, two days after opening their NBL pre-season campaign with a loss to the Adelaide 36ers at a packed house in Canberra.
It is another chance for a new-look Hawks outfit to build the steely resolve they will pride themselves on this season following a forgettable winter that gutted the club.
A player like Jackson, one of the league's most successful imports who quickly became a fan favourite in Canberra, boasts a winning mentality which suggests he is the perfect man to build the Hawks around.
The three-time NBL championship guard and former league most valuable player winner knows there is plenty of work to be done, but the goal remains the same for the former NBA player.
"The goal is to win the championship," Jackson said.
"But for now we just want to take care of a lot of things we can fix right now, so hopefully we can get it done before the season starts.
"We’re a brand new team so we’re going to figure out our identity and get things together. As soon as we get that down pat, then we’ll figure something out about what we want to do.
"We knew the first game was going to be really rough, that was our first time actually playing with each other against another team.
"We knew there was going to be a lot of things that weren’t going to go as well as we thought it would but for the most part, we’re just glad we got this out of the way so we can learn from how to get better as a team.
"It’s a quick turnaround because now we’ve got a really good team in Sydney, so we’ve got to learn how to turn it around really fast."
Illawarra's first steps into a new era complemented their first steps into Canberra as club general manager Mat Campbell looks to expand the Hawks' footprint into a new market.
Campbell is determined to bring NBL regular season games to Canberra - which could happen as early as this year - and turn the Hawks into the ACT's adopted team.
The plan moving forward is for the Hawks to play pre-season games in Canberra on the back of a camp, which would bring the entire squad to the capital for a few days to interact with the community and junior associations. That would then be built on during the regular season.
"We want to put the heroes in front of them, who is that person that is going to inspire someone to be a professional basketballer," Campbell said.
"When I look back at my journey, I can still remember when I first had a professional basketball come and talk to me. That made me want to be a professional basketballer for myself.
"I still remember shooting hoops with Andrew Gaze when he would have been probably only 20 at that stage, and I would have been 10 or something similar to that when I was shooting foul shots with him.
"They’re things you remember as a junior, and they’re the things that push you to want to be a basketball player. We want to emulate that with the Hawks down here in Canberra, so hopefully they can see them on the court and they can see what they can potentially achieve."
They are the things that worked for Campbell - he is one of just five Hawks players to have their jersey retired after a stellar 524-game career with an NBL championship ring to boot.
