Tim Taranto won't have too much time this week to sit around wondering where he will be playing football next year. On Monday his father, stepmother and two brothers were due to fly in. Other relatives were on their way from Brisbane and the Gold Coast and they will all spend Thursday night together at his house in Cheltenham, eating turkey and celebrating Thanksgiving. Why? Because while Taranto was born in Melbourne and is very much an Australian, his father was born and lives in Texas.
"It's going to be a busy few days, but it will be good to have everyone here. It's a big holiday for everyone," said Taranto, who will fly to Sydney for the draft on Friday morning with a smaller support crew. "It should help take my mind off it all a bit, but I don't feel bad for letting myself think about it now. Earlier in the year it didn't feel like it was allowed, because there was so much footy to play and because there was so long to go. Now that it's almost here and there's nothing else on, it doesn't feel like the wrong thing to do."
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Taranto has played football for as long as he can remember, since starting Auskick down the road from home and making his way through to the Sandringham Dragons. For a long time he balanced it with basketball, and for a very long time that was his better sport. When he made it into inter-league football teams he always felt like one of the last players picked and that he spent a lot of time sitting on the bench. "I was a lot smaller and a lot skinnier back then," he said. "I wasn't all that good. People used to tell me the only reason I got picked was because I ran a good beep test."
Basketball was taking him places, but by the time he played for Vic Metro in the under-16 championships and received an invitation to try out for the under-18 team Taranto knew he didn't want to keep playing. He felt like he could be a better footballer, that he could improve. He watched a good friend, Fremantle draftee Harley Balic, struggle physically and emotionally to keep playing both sports. The training load for basketball was full-on; when he started playing at 10, he was told the season wouldn't finish until he was 18. He knew before he even started his last year that he wouldn't make it that far.
![AFL draft prospect Tim Taranto has plenty of support on both sides of the Pacific.](/web/20170323215243im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/u/h/m/u/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gstk3k.png/1479841402554.jpg)
"The next step with basketball was to move overseas, to go to college in America. If I'd kept going I could probably have found my way there, but I wasn't too keen on it," he said. "I felt like I had another level to go to in footy and there's so much training to do for basketball that it doesn't ever stop. I literally didn't have a weekend off for years and I was over it, it wasn't even a hard decision in the end. I thought that if I really focused on footy, it might get me good enough to make it to the AFL one day. That's how I was thinking for my whole last year of basketball, that I was ready to walk away."
It was a good decision. Taranto started this year by writing out a long list of goals – to make the TAC Cup grand final, the Vic Metro side and the combine – and will finish it by being one of the first few players called out at the draft. He wrenched the ball out of the middle, he took marks and he did big things at some important times. He played well on grand final day and even better five days later in the All Stars game he found it hard to find the energy for. He developed some confidence in himself, too. "Tim's always had a lot of routine. He's had to eat this and do this, and go to bed at this time," said his mother, Jess. "Before the All Stars game he was in camp and not able to do any of it, and he went out and played really well. I think it proved to him that he can adapt to whatever's going on. It's been a long year for him and there's so much expectation that comes with it. I'm really proud of how he's handled it."
Taranto was two years old when his parents separated, and his dad moved home to the US, where they had originally met. His mum had him when she was young and he considers her "as my sister, almost. She's looked after me in every way and she's someone I can talk to about everything, about all the hard things". She feels as though the people around Tim – her family, his football family, his basketball family, his St Kevins school community and all their other friends – have helped her to bring him up. "The way I think about it is that there's a village that has raised Tim," she said. "There's a lot of people who have loved him and looked after him."
Then there is his American family. It has been tougher to get to Texas in the past few years but when he was younger Tim would spend four, five or six weeks in the States each year getting to know everyone and spending lots of time with them. His father, Phillip, would make a trip to Australia every year, too; they talk all the time and are close. In the past few years Tim's also had two brothers to start getting to know: Hudson and Davis.
"It's a bit different, but we have a good relationship and he knows me as well as anyone knows me," said Taranto. "He's in Dallas now, but he used to be in Houston, so every year I would go over there with mum or my uncle or my grandparents and just spend some time with him. I can remember one holiday where every morning we would get up, walk up to the basketball court, play for four or five hours then come back and spend the rest of the day in the pool.
"It's been harder to get back in the last couple of years, but I've done so much travelling. We went to New York one time, and Vegas. He took me skiing in Colorado one year. He has family all around Texas, so I've done a lot of driving around there as well, to see everyone. It's been good. People think it must be weird, but we get along well and him and mum are just like mates. It's all worked out well and he's excited about the draft, he's drawn up a map of Australia and he knows where all the teams are. He's circled the ones on the east coast and said 'make sure you try and get there'."
He knows how the game works too. Sort of. "The first national championships game was streamed on the AFL website. It was two o'clock in the afternoon here but night time in America and Phillip had all his mates around watching it on the telly with no idea what was going on," Jess said. "I kept getting all these texts saying 'What are they doing? Why is he jumping on his head.' So it felt really special, to know we were all there watching Tim play and that he had all these people over on the other side of the world doing the same thing. He has his American family and he has us, and everyone's really proud of him. We're all as excited, and proud of him. It's just exciting, to see where it all goes from here."