Playing in front of tens of thousands on the biggest stage in US college basketball, Sunshine Coast prodigy Jorden Page made his mark, hitting big shots in the biggest moments.
And then he seemed to disappear. But there is more to his story.
Page was born into a prominent Sunshine Coast basketball family. Growing up at the Maroochydore Clippers basketball stadium, he learnt to play on the court named after his grandmother. “Four days old or something like that, I was at the stadium,” he says.
His family history runs deep at the club, with grandparents Sid and Beryl Page its longest-serving members and considered by many as the founders of Sunshine Coast basketball.
When he was 14 years old, after making multiple state teams, he competed in his first national championship. It was to be the beginning of bigger things.
Page had just started high school at Matthew Flinders Anglican College on a basketball scholarship when he was selected as one of seven players in the country to train at the Australian Institute of Sport, so he moved to Canberra.
His trajectory was only upwards, doing Euro league tours in Germany, Italy and France with the Australian under-19 national team.
In 2009, after playing in the under-19 world championship and being named the MVP, Page was conservatively dubbed the number seven ranked player coming out of Australia by college recruiters. Not too long after returning from the tournament, Page checked his pigeonhole at the AIS to find over 30 scholarship offers to play college basketball in the US.
“I was never too worried about grades or even picking a school to play in; I figured it would work out,” he says. “I kind of let it get away from me and I ended up having to repeat grade 12 to make sure my grades were at an NCAA level.”
Once the colleges learnt that it would take another year for him to come to the US, the messages stopped coming. While the scholarships were still on the table, only one college was with Page every step of the way: Saint Mary’s College in California.
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The timeline matched perfectly, Patty Mills was about to be drafted into the NBA leaving a point guard position at a top college open for Page, so he committed early. Later that year Matthew Dellavedova, another top Australian prospect at the time, also committed to Saint Mary’s College.
“Ideally, I wouldn’t go somewhere I’d be competing for minutes with him; I’d be competing against him,” Page says. “Looking back on it I never would have gone to college in the first place.”
Dellavedova currently plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA.
Page was often overlooked for Dellavedova and he was the team’s backup point guard for the first two years of college.
“I was a big-game player,” he says. “Whenever we needed someone to get in there and make plays, that was always me. All of my best games where I played the most were against those big schools.”
The team had great success, and suddenly they were being escorted through cities by police, playing in front of up to 50,000 fans.
The biggest stage of them all was in March of 2010 at the West Coast Conference semi-final against NCAA powerhouse Gonzaga. After a Cinderella run to the championship game, Page hit an and-one to beat Gonzaga and propel them into the grand final.
As his teammates ran to pick him up and celebrate with him, no one knew that was the play that caused him a career-changing injury. Page landed awkwardly and tore his left meniscus.
The doctors removed the entire meniscus, leaving nothing in his knee to stop his bones from grinding. The severe bone bruising led to a year off and while he returned to the court, he said his knee never felt the same.
In a strange twist, Page found himself back again in a WCC final against Gonzaga, same court, same situation. Incredibly, he tore the ACL in his right knee. It was a turning point.
Page returned to Australia and played in leagues like the Queensland Basketball League and the South East Australia Basketball League. He played some of his last basketball on the Sunshine Coast for the Clippers in 2016.
While Page, now 30, still plans to play again someday, the perspective of his life’s highs and lows has allowed him to focus on something he feels is important: training children in basketball and physical fitness across the Sunshine Coast.
Having obtained his certificate in elite calisthenics, he also uses his knowledge to run his own personal wellbeing business, selling natural supplements, teas and equipment with the help of his wife and three kids.
“I never thought about living life without the game of basketball, but I’ve never been happier in my entire life than where I’m at right now,” he says. “All in all the perspective, the experiences, that’s what made me who I am today. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
