Charlie Edwards’ bedroom is the stereotypical teenage boy’s hideaway, superhero posters deck the walls and video games line the shelves. He calls me over and shows me his iPad, proud of all the latest games on it. He grabs a footy and asks to kick it with me, dodging the imaginary defenders and kicking the winning goal.

He’s just got back from school but he’s full of energy, smiling and laughing whilst running around his backyard.

What isn’t apparent is Charlie’s intellectual disability and ADHD.

From an early age, his mum Tanya Edwards says the signs were there.

“When Charlie was born, you couldn’t really notice anything, but as he got a little bit older (six months onwards) you could tell something was the matter,” she says.

“All of his milestones were really delayed and he had a few health issues with his speech and occupational therapy.”

AFL has always been Charlie’s favourite sport, with West Coast Eagle’s player Jake Waterman his favourite player.

Despite Charlie’s disability, his love for sport persisted but due to a lack of sporting programs for the disabled it was difficult to enrol Charlie.

During a Google search one day, Edwards stumbled across the Starkick program. The program was aimed at giving children with disabilities, physical or intellectual, a chance to play football at local community clubs with ‘able-bodied’ children.

The idea

The program was founded over 10 years ago by Rob Geersen and has flourished since its creation, with over 29 clubs in Western Australia from as far north as Broome down to Albany.

Geersen now works at the Western Australian All Abilities Association as an Inclusion Specialist.

Geersen has a son with a disability, who caught meningitis when he was just 13 months old resulting in Cerebral Palsy. Long stays at the hospital became the norm, a massive change and challenge in Rob and his family’s lives.

“We went from living everyday life to all of a sudden a child who couldn’t eat, he couldn’t roll over, couldn’t hold his head up and had to be on oxygen at night,” he says.  

“We were told he may not even make it.”

Up until to this point in his life he was unaware of living life with a disability.

After Geersen’s eldest son joined Coolbinia Bombers Auskick team, he noticed a child who would come watch his older brothers play but wasn’t allowed to join in himself as he had a disability.

After this experience, he began to plan the beginnings of the Starkick program, designed for children from as young as five all the up until 17-years-old to participate together in the sport they love.

The sessions are designed to be as similar to an able-bodied session as possible. Boys and girls train together and are split into teams at the end of the session to play in a non-contact game with a shortened field.

The idea of creating a community environment that welcomed disabled children and their carers into everyday lives was something at the forefront of his mind.

“People with a disability would go off and do an activity but they weren’t part of the community,” he says.

Living with a disability

This sense of isolation and exclusion from broader society is a common occurrence for many families whose children have disabilities.

Luke Goss and his son Ethan have been in the Starkick Program for eight years. Ethan has Fragile X Syndrome, a disability where the X chromosome doesn’t produce proteins for brain development. Goss recognised the divide between families with disabled children and wider society.

“No one really knows except you and your own family, exactly what you’re going through.

Geersen adds: “Society goes you’ve got a group for your people.

“You belong over there, not with us as the collective,” he says.

Hard work pays off

Implementing Starkick was not an easy job with late nights and knocking on doors becoming a regular occurrence for Geersen. He admitted that he wasn’t expecting the program to even come to fruition.

“I thought we might get five or six kids if we were lucky,” he says.

The program even had criticism from people who didn’t want it to go ahead.

“We had various people that said we weren’t allowed to do this,” he says.

Unknown to him the demand was there. The program had 47 registered kids in its first year, with many travelling over an hour one-way just to get to Coolbinia. One family would even fly down from Newman for medical tests and attend the program, as a way to escape the seriousness of their child’s disability.

The growth of a community

As the program began to grow and new children and their families joined, Geersen really focused on creating a community that embraced each family’s unique lives.

Both Edwards and Goss are full of praise for Geersen and the Starkick community.

“There’s always encouragement from Rob and the other volunteers and coaches down there,” Goss says.

“Other parents understand what that parent would be going through.”

Edwards says: “We’re all willing to help the kids, it doesn’t matter if it’s your child, you’ll go help another child,” Edwards says.

The parents haven’t been the only ones to gain something from the program. The children involved have not only created their own community, but the program has formed a sense of purpose for many of the children who wouldn’t have had this opportunity in the past.

Charlie especially loves the program and looks forward to going to Starkick every week.

“Seeing Charlie’s face light up each week, seeing the coach Rob or seeing his friends,” says Edwards.

Mark Korbuda is the chief executive officer of Positive Moods, a provider that specialises in behaviour sport and counselling. He says programs such as Starkick are important as an escape from the endless hours of counselling for parents and the children.

“More of these community programs is very much needed and has a huge impact not only on the children but also the families as well,” he says.

“I think it’s important to have these programs and have other people who are in a similar situation to them, so that they can form that community and live as normal a life as possible.”

Goss says his son has not only improved mentally but also physically.

“His skills have increased dramatically,” he says.

“There was no pressure on him. There was no pressure on us and that’s the best part about Starkick.”

Reflecting on the program’s success, Geersen mentioned a number of highlights that made it all worth it.

“There was a kid who for the life of him couldn’t kick a footy,” he says. He would put it on the ground, soccer it off the ground, throw it in the air and behind his head but to drop from hand to foot he’d never quite mastered.

“His dad was trying and trying at home but on one of those buddy days, one of his club mates (older kids) taught this young kid to kick a ball properly for the first time in his life and I went that’s pretty bloody cool. A 16-year-old teaching another kid, I had tried, his dad had tried with no hope and 40 minutes of bonding with someone he saw as a mentor.”

The future

Geersen has many plans for the future of the program including making the program accessible to other children across Australia.

“I want to see this available to kids everywhere around the country,” he says.

In order to continue to grow programs such as Starkick, limitations and prejudices by society towards disabled people and their families need to be broken.

Korduba says such limitations have continued to make it hard for disabled people to fully integrate into communities in society.

“I think the community aspect we can definitely improve.”

Geersen says although times have changed, the stigma is still there.

“The general population looks at people with disabilities and thinks of them as ‘you poor person’,” he says.

The program has become a source of good for many families and their children and without the work of Geersen, this opportunity may not have been available. Rob has used sport to create a community of parents and children that at times felt isolated due to the unique situations they were in.

“Sport is such a powerful way of bringing people together,” he says. “Sport is just a vehicle, community is the outcome.”

Geersen was a finalist for the 2025 Local Hero for Western Australia award.