Dibs

Australian sports celebrity Dr. Ric Charlesworth coached the Hockeyroos — the national women’s field-hockey team — all the way to world dominance including three Olympic gold medals. And he credits Shakespeare for his success, claiming that the Bard’s insights helped him help his athletes fulfill their potential. According to UQ News Online, Charlesworth will speak at the University of Queensland’s World Shakespeare Congress next month about his book, Shakespeare the Coach. “As a coach you are always looking for different ways to say things and for messages that came from someone else,” he told UQ News. Among many examples, he cited “Sweet are the uses of adversity” from As You Like It: “It means pushing people sometimes harder than they want to be pushed.” Charlesworth is a doctor of medicine and also a former Australian Hockey Team captain. He played with the Kookaburras for a record sixteen years. He was also a Federal Parliamentarian for a decade: “During my time in politics I was a patron of a playhouse in Perth. I used to go to a lot of theatre and in that time I got really interested in Shakespeare.”