Tanesha Faulkner, or Tango, as she prefers to be known, sits comfortably on a picnic table near Maleny Library. One leg is tucked up onto the bench and the other swings idly below her. Her elbow is placed on the scuffed painted wood. She leans her head against it and enjoys the warmth from the sun. It’s loud around her as heavy traffic flows through the main part of town. Clad in Converse and casual clothing, the 22-year-old looks so comfortable for someone who is working hard to bridge the gap between psychology and physical sports. The psychology graduate and long-time soccer player, who finished her degree in 2020, watches the traffic whizz by. When Tango switched from tennis to soccer, it was the defining moment in identifying a problem that needed to be addressed in the sporting community.
Originally, she participated in tennis as an individual sport and found there was not a lot of help available with the mental health side of it. As a result, she stopped enjoying it.
After joining the Maleny women’s soccer team, despite them not having won a game all year or having a proper coach, she discovered it was comprised of phenomenal players who were fantastic at teamwork and communication.
“We got through all that and we got a really good coach in,” she says. “I was studying psychology at the time, so I started doing a few psychology things within the team, and I was like hey, this is really cool and I’m actually really enjoying this.”
This was the birth of her business: Brain Game. A smart and memorable play on words.
“Brain Game is basically trying to bridge the gap between psychology and between the actual physical sports,” she says. “I’m basically like a mental skills trainer. I would take kids through goal setting activities or positive self-talk activities. So, when they’re on the court playing tennis or they’re on the field playing soccer, or they’re communicating with their teammates, they’re doing it in a lot more constructive way.”
Mental health awareness is lacking in the sports community. Tango comments that while there is acknowledgement of anxieties that players experience, there are no effective strategies in place to treat or prevent them. It is found that athletes are far more likely to report higher levels of anxiety and depression at 17.5 per cent compared to the general community norms of 9.5 per cent.
Brain Game also aids kids in practising self-awareness.
“I coach a mixed under 12 and 13 boys’ soccer team,” Tango says with a fond smile. “It definitely keeps me on my toes.” She laughs as she describes her coaching role as essentially just telling them how to kick a soccer ball the best way. “They’re kids, all they want to do is be out here running,” she says.
With her passion for sport and a degree in psychology, which she jokes that a career quiz she took in the tenth grade inspired her to do, Tango has future aspirations for Brain Game. At the moment, it’s a one-woman team, but an office space, rooms for workshops and more staff are just some of Tango’s future goals for her business.
“I’d love to hold workshops for kids that have Autism, and have programs to facilitate them getting into sport,” she says. “I don’t think there’s anything like that out there.”
There is a clear passion and depth of knowledge in her words as she effortlessly ticks off on each finger the key components of sports performance: physical performance, tactile awareness, technical skills and mental performance.
“A lot of people would think about that as just your general pie graph where it’s twenty-five per cent each, but your mental performance is the only one of all those four that actually affects all the other ones,” she explains. To be ideal, she says it needs to look more like a graph, with mental performance right at the top and the other three below. While community sports groups are proven to improve mental health, it still needs that extra push. Her relaxed demeanour demonstrates her confidence with Brain Game; a fledging business that she hopes to expand past the Sunshine Coast and north Brisbane. Determined to bridge a much-needed gap, Tango Faulkner is well on her way.
Student journo 