Posted on 27 June, 2017

Written by Kate Butterfield

By day, Kilsyth Cobras’ favourite son Auryn Macmillan lives a pretty green, environmentally-friendly sort of lifestyle, but by night, the 204-centimetre power forward’s world would be far better described as ‘virtual’.

Macmillan, who returned to Kilsyth for his seventh SEABL season following a stint with the Rockhampton Rockets in the Queensland Basketball League last year, is a self-confessed clean-living greenie. But while the 30-year-old athlete has long been recognised as one of Australia’s leading vegan sportsmen, he is now gaining notoriety in the rapidly growing world of eSports. eSports, or electronic sports, generally take the form of organised, multiplayer video game competitions, more often played between professional players.

It’s a huge growth industry and the NBA recently announced that seventeen of its franchises had bought into it its inaugural NBA 2K eSports League. Even the AFL wants in to the $1.2 billion eSports industry. So these days (or rather nights, given the time difference in the US), when he’s not training and playing with the Cobras SEABL team, Macmillan is now working in a developmental role with a Boston-based company in the online e-sports universe.

The world that Macmillan now finds himself immersed in is a long way from his simple life growing up in the idyllic surrounds of Christmas Hills, but it is one that he has had an interest in from a young age. Macmillan always enjoyed playing video games, trading card games and fantasy board games like Dungeons and Dragons. When he wasn’t out skateboarding and rollerblading with his mates, that’s how he filled his time. And even after he discovered basketball and his playing career took off – a career that took him all the way to America, Germany, England, Wollongong and Far North Queensland – his downtime was spent playing computer games.

Macmillan enjoyed a peaceful upbringing in the Yarra Valley within a family that has long committed to living a sustainable life. His mum Angie, a creative arts therapist and nurse, and dad, Greg, who runs a recording studio from the family home, instilled green values into their two sons from a very early age, long before basketball became a priority for the towering Macmillan.

“We were definitely a green family, and wherever we can, we still try to be environmentally-friendly,” Macmillan says. “Mum and Dad ran solar power at the house and we always try to do our bit for recycling and live as sustainable a life as possible. My wife Laci and I are also vegan, and part of our rationale behind that is the reduced environmental impact of choosing a vegan lifestyle. It’s something we’ve put a fair bit of thought into as a family.”

A fair bit of thought is rather an understatement. Just a couple of years after Macmillan first picked up a basketball at the relatively late age of fifteen, his parents were driving him all over Victoria to play representative basketball. His dad put a great deal of thought into how he could reduce the environmental impact that hundreds of kilometres of driving each week had.

“It was genius,” Macmillan laughs. “When I was about seventeen, mum went out and bought an old diesel Mercedes, and dad, being a bit of a tinkerer, realised he could convert the Mercedes to run on vegetable oil rather than diesel. So he did a bit of tuning and messed around with it and he got the thing running on veggie oil. So we went out a bought a couple more of these old banger Mercedes and converted them too.”

In an effort to make the cars even more sustainable, the family would use recycled oil.

“So we’d go around and get the old used oil from fish and chip shops, filter it out and then use it to run the cars,” Macmillan says. “As we were driving around, we’d smell like an old chip fryer. They were pretty awesome those cars, but we lost them when the Black Saturday fires hit in 2009.”

At the time of the fires, Macmillan was studying science and psychology, thousands of kilometres away, at Gardner-Webb University in North Carolina on a basketball scholarship. It was the most difficult time of an otherwise “incredible” four-year stint playing Division 1 college basketball. Remarkably, Macmillan was offered the scholarship just three years after first picking up a basketball. Hard work, he says, is what got him there.

“I was fifteen when I first started playing basketball at lunchtimes with my friends, and then I joined my first team when I was sixteen,” Macmillan recalls.

“I was tall back then for my age, probably about 195 centimetres, but basketball didn’t come naturally to me at all. I was pretty uncoordinated, I couldn’t dribble without having the ball stolen off me and I could barely get a shot off without it being blocked, but I learned to love it pretty quickly and so started training really hard. I think that’s why people gave me opportunities, because I worked so hard.”

Macmillan played for a local Healesville team before switching to the Eastern Eagles and playing in Kilsyth Basketball’s Junior Domestic Competition. He tried out for his first Cobras representative team at the Under-18 level.

“I was still relatively new to the game, pretty raw, and didn’t have much in the way of skills,” Macmillan says. “But I was big and I tried hard, so they gave me a shot. What I say to all the kids out there now who are interested in playing rep is that you’re always going to be in with a chance if you bust your butt. People will have a lot of patience and be willing to work with those players who are willing to work hard. The thing that’s going to get you noticed more than anything, particularly in the younger age groups, is hard work and attitude. If coaches see that you’re willing to put in the work and listen, and if you’re coachable and you work hard, then more than likely you’ll get an opportunity. I think that’s what I showed when I came to tryouts and that’s how I got my first chance.”

Macmillan was picked up for the Under 18-3 team as a reserve player and within weeks was in the team’s starting five. He went on to be selected in the Cobras Under 20’s Men’s team and earned a spot on the Cobras VBL team, which is now known as the VYC Men’s team. Behind the scenes, Macmillan’s Cobras coach Rod Popp had put together highlight tapes of Macmillan to send to colleges across America. Of the five or six schools interested in his services, he chose Gardner-Webb, and relocated to the oddly-named Boiling Springs in 2006, a place that ‘was freezing cold and had no springs’, Macmillan laughs.

During his final few months of college, Macmillan met his wife Laci, a native of North Carolina, and within days of arriving in Melbourne to be reunited, the couple was on a plane to Frankfurt, where Macmillan had picked up a contract with the TV Langen Giraffes in the German Pro B Basketball League. Post-Frankfurt, the couple returned to Melbourne for another stint with Kilsyth, before Macmillan was signed up to play for the Wollongong Hawks in the NBL, and then the Melbourne Tigers the following year, with another season as a Cobra in between. A season with the Plymouth Raiders in England followed, before he signed with the Rockhampton Rockets in 2016.

When Macmillan first picked up a basketball as a gangly, uncoordinated teen, little did he realise that he would go on to have a rewarding twelve-year basketball career that delivered far more than simply the joy of playing a sport he loves.

“Basketball has been fantastic to me,” Macmillan says. “Through it, I’ve had the opportunity to see the world and play in a bunch of places and meet a bunch of people that I otherwise wouldn’t have come across. It’s opened the doors to my new career in eSports and If it wasn’t for basketball I probably wouldn’t have met my wife and had my son Atlas. I certainly wouldn’t have a huge network of friends in the US, in Germany, here, and in the UK. I really do feel like I can touch down on any continent now and know someone and have a couch to crash on and somewhere to stay.”

“Not only that, basketball has also got me two degrees and paid the bills for the last seven years, so we’ve been really, really blessed. I’m so pleased I put all that effort into my basketball. It just shows that hard work can pay off in so many ways.”