Ever since he was a young child, Curtin Physiotherapy graduate Jake Harvie has always had a special connection to the Olympics.
Coming from a strong bloodline of hockey royalty, his grandfather triple-Olympian Gordon Pearce, was one of five hockey brothers from WA who represented Australia in hockey in the 1950s and 1960s.
Following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Jake has represented Australia in two gold-medal-winning campaigns at the Commonwealth Games and recently competed at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.
Ahead of his departure to Paris, we sat down with Jake to learn more about his journey to becoming an Australian Olympic hockey player.
Did you always have a passion for hockey?
Growing up in a sporting family, I played many different sports. My grandfather, Gordon Pearce, is a triple-Olympian, so there was always something special about that connection. I kind of always wanted to follow in his footsteps.
However, I started playing hockey through my dad. My brother, Tom and I would always venture to the Boyanup Hockey Club every weekend, eagerly watching dad play while hitting balls on the sidelines.
It wasn’t long before we both started playing junior hockey together at the Boyanup Hockey Club. In those formative years, we made many great friends, and I was fortunate to be selected for the state team at the age of 12.
Some of my fondest childhood memories were spent at the Bunbury Hockey Stadium playing hockey with my brother every Saturday. After our junior games, we would always wait with anticipation for the senior games, playing with a stick and ball on the back oval for hours on end!
What has been a standout moment of your professional hockey career?
My biggest standout moment was probably making the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games men’s hockey team.
Previously, I was selected for the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games and the 2018 World Cup, but I got dropped for the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Games. This was the first time I had been dropped from the team, which was a setback. However, this only motivated me to work even harder to get back into the team.
At first, I didn’t have any expectations to get back in and I thought the whole process was going to be much longer than expected, so to make the team and win at the 2022 Commonwealth Games was a huge personal achievement.
Following this, I made the 2023 Men’s FIH Hockey World Cup team and I’ve hardly missed a game since that non-selection in 2021.
At the end of the day, these setbacks were the greatest test of my resilience, so finding my way back into the team and winning gold at the Commonwealth Games made all the hard work and sleepless nights worth it!
What did your Paris Olympics training look like?
We train pretty much every day of the week, other than Wednesday or Sunday. In the months leading up to the games, we were training up to 30 hours a week, so it was full-on.
We train twice a day on Mondays and Thursdays. On Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, we train on the pitch combined with meetings and video review sessions.
One of my strength and conditioning coaches, who tutored at Curtin, has always instilled in me the importance of recovery days. So, I try to fit a Pilates class in somewhere during the week in amongst training.
We will travel to Europe in a few weeks and then to Paris, which will give us plenty of time to prepare. The Olympics are no different from any other competition, we want to win and execute our plan as best we can over there, at the end of the day we are competing for gold. It’s very exciting and we can’t believe that we will be over there competing in the next few months!
What was the biggest lesson you learned at Curtin which has helped shape you into the professional you are today?
While studying and juggling a professional hockey career, I’ve learned that balance is a bit of a myth. Many young athletes are constantly told that we need to have balance in our lives, but I don’t think the concept of work-life balance is articulated very well.
I’ve found that if you want to be successful in your sport sometimes you can’t always have a 50/50 balance. Often, we struggle to put equal time into every aspect of our lives, and that’s completely normal.
There were times when hockey significantly outweighed the time I could dedicate to my studies, and moments when I had to devote more time to my studies to make sure I could stay afloat.
Particularly over the last few years of my degree, I had to accept that I wasn’t going to be as prepared as I’d like to be in my studies, which is not what everyone wants to hear but it was a reality.
I’ve probably put more hours into my sporting career than anyone I know because that’s what’s important to me and gives me the confidence to play well.
So, I’ve had to come to terms with the realities of this decision and learn to become flexible and adaptable. This has meant that I’ve had to make sacrifices, such as saying no to friends and going to bed early on Friday and Saturday nights so that I could dedicate the early hours of my weekends to studying and completing assignments.
These sacrifices mean that you may miss out on things, but it’s not forever. At the end of the day, it comes down to knowing what’s important to you, being ok with putting the time into what’s necessary to master that skill, and not feeling like you need to balance it all evenly.
At the end of the day, if you want to succeed in one area of your life, you’ve got to know what’s most important and give it all you’ve got!
Finally, what is your best advice when it comes to finding balance?
1. Planning is important.
Firstly, if you want to do multiple things in your life, you must be organised to ensure you can make time in your week for what’s important. Sometimes this may mean planning to help you see what’s on the horizon and prioritise what’s important at certain times of the year. Planning just gives you a head start and an opportunity not to be chasing your tail!
2. Reframe how you define ‘busy’.
If you enjoy doing something, then there’s no reason why you can’t spend hours pursuing it. For me, playing lots of hockey is healthy, it’s a vehicle for self-discovery and an opportunity to improve, which is why I’m so motivated to train for hours on end.
We all enjoy doing activities that we are good at, so it’s about finding multiple ways to enjoy those pursuits and looking at your pursuits as an opportunity to improve yourself as a person rather than a job that must be done.
3. Practising gratitude.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to improve and chase the next goal but I think it’s important to offset that with what you already have.
Everyone has something good in their environment, but often we find it easier to search for the negatives in a situation rather than the positives. So, I think it’s about being conscious of our thoughts and realizing there is so much good in the world, while also accepting that there’s nothing wrong with wanting more.
4. You only know what you know.
Sometimes you only know what you’re capable of because that’s what you’ve always done. I encourage people not to wait for a setback, like getting dropped from an Olympics, to go after their dreams. You never know what you will find out about yourself when you branch out or apply yourself and put in that extra mile.
Read more about how Jake managed to complete his studies alongside his professional hockey career here.
Jake Harvie, Australian Olympic Hockey player, and Curtin Physiotherapy graduate
Graduating from Curtin with a Bachelor of Science in Physiotherapy in 2023, Jake is an Australian Olympian and two-time Commonwealth Game gold medallist playing for the Australian men’s hockey team, the Kookaburras. A tenacious defender, Jake has performed on the world hockey stage on more than 70 occasions, recently competing at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, and he was a gold medallist at the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games and the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games.
