Life Outside Cricket: Peter Hatzoglou

The final episode in our special podcast series with The Grade Cricketer, Life Outside Cricket, features boom off-spinner Peter Hatzoglou.

Peter burst onto the Big Bash stage last summer with the Melbourne Renegades having only played premier cricket prior to his debut. Following the BBL season, he debuted for South Australia in the Marsh One-Day Cup.

We speak with Peter about how his life outside cricket has changed since the turn of the year.

The best bits have been transcribed below, or you can listen to the full episode here.

What Peter does outside of the game...

I've had a bit of a different journey into cricket than most. I guess following high school, most professional cricketers would go onto a rookie contract or something like that whereas I took year 12 off cricket and focused on my studies and cracked on with uni like a lot of people do, studying finance and international relations.

I leveraged my network at my footy and cricket clubs to find internships at different places and eventually landed a gig as a data analyst.

In a nutshell, that's my story outside of cricket.

Peter's advice to the professional athletes who feel as though their contract status is a bit up in the air...

A few months ago I was playing in the Big Bash and things were going quite well, I thought I was the bees knees. Then I was lucky enough to get a few matches with South Australia but they didn't really go as I'd hoped and I didn't get a rookie contract there.

I guess my takeaway from that now I'm back in Melbourne in finance is that you don't how cricket is going to go, so you need to treat as your career outside of cricket just as seriously and value it just much as you do playing and you'll end up taking a lot of pressure off yourself to succeed.