From Australia to the US: Josiah Gilbert's Golf Journey

But where I want to start this conversation, Josiah, is your upbringing in Australia. Can you just give us a bit of a backstory of how you ended up in the States and really just your upbringing and playing golf in Australia? So interested in this. Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of a long story. Well, let's get it. Let's get it. Yeah. So I was born on the Sunshine Coast, which is right next to Brisbane, Australia on the East Coast. Just spent two years there before my family moved to Mount Isa. I was on the elders. Where is that? So that's in the middle of nowhere basically, is it? because everybody lives like on the coastline of Australia so where is yeah where exactly is it basically the middle of the red dirt if you go 20 hours drive like northwest from Brisbane uh and it's a mining town i think they did from memory like silver and lead mainly a lot of lead uh and my dad took a job with the city council there and we spent seven years there it's actually yeah kind of kind of crazy is there any golf courses there there was not any golf well there was one but it was like like it was red dirt was the fairway so i didn't i wasn't playing golf or anything okay everything else played everything else you could think of uh and then when i was nine my dad decided to go do the PGA traineeship for like to become a PGA pro up in the Gold Coast uh so by then i'd had we had all four of my youngest siblings so all five kids two parents we trekked all the way up to the Gold Coast and dad spent two years there in the internship i still didn't play golf there actually my first experience probably like officially with golf was my 11th birthday we went out and just played like night golf par three course and then right after that we moved over to perth for dad to take a job there after he completed his internship and then spent seven years over in perth first about a year of it playing baseball wow and and it was just way too much travel and time and money to play baseball dad was in golf i could get some free golf clubs i was like all right i'll give it a try wow so i picked up golf at like 12 um like roughly and then probably started actually playing around 14 wow devoting a little bit of time to it uh spent three years over there kind of through covid so me and actually Aldric Potgieter grew up together that's right because he spent some time there before he went to south africa we're about we're about 25 30 minutes away from each other cool and he moved to south africa about a month and a half after i moved out uh over to the states so basically when covid was getting really bad yeah both of the families decided like yeah time to kind of get out of here and make sure we can just we couldn't travel anywhere or anything like that so and when covid hit uh dad was working at a golf club he had been for the seven years we were there in perth um and we just left where i think it was like early october our parents like called us in the like you know like just all the kids in the room like hey like two months we're moving to america for good so pack whatever you like and so we took a took a cardboard box taped it together and my golf clubs and we moved over and actually made our way to Prattville Alabama which is about an hour west of Auburn where my great grandma was stayed with her for a couple of months um and then dad got a job at the RTJ Capitol Hill he's the director of instruction there now played a season of high school basketball did you wait what high school did you go to uh played for Stanhope Elmore yeah okay we did kind of like online school because it was kind of weird how we had to transfer credits over from australia and stuff i feel like you could dunk i just have a pretty my brother can i can't you couldn't couldn't all right you're like you could touch net i've got rim i can i can grade like i can touch rim fine and everything but my brother's got the hops he's good i was just along for the ride wow like a season of basketball it was in the winter um and then so we moved in november and then i committed to Auburn by february Thank you.