Kyu Hyun Shim with Hawks players Kobie McDowell-White and Will “Davo” Hickey. Photo Joel Armstrong/Illawarra Hawks.
Kyu Hyun Shim didn’t come to Wollongong to change his life. He came to see a friend.
Last January, the 25-year-old from Seoul flew to Australia to visit his high school teammate and best mate Lee Hyun-jung or “H J Lee” as we know him, a Korean national basketballer who would soon become a beloved championship player for the Illawarra Hawks.
Kyu (“Q” to the boys now) was supposed to continue on to Canada to study international relations.
Instead, something about the place — and the people — got under his skin.
“I love Australia so much,” he says simply.
“I came here just to visit Lee, because he’s my best friend. We are like family.
“I loved being here. I changed my plan, applied to UOW and I got accepted.”
A scholarship sealed it with his mum back home.
“She didn’t like it at first,” he laughs, “but when I said I got a scholarship, she said, ‘OK, you can go.’”
Kyu enrolled in international relations at the University of Wollongong and quietly found his way to the Hawks’ training floor.
He’d always dreamed of coaching. Lee told him there was an opening to be an intern coach.
“It’s my dream job,” Kyu says.
“I applied and I got it. I love being around my guys, spending time with the boys, learning from the coaches. Coaching players is totally different in Korea. I’m learning a lot.”
The learning wasn’t only on the whiteboard. It was in the way a professional team in a coastal city took in a stranger and made him family.
“When I first started hanging around with Lee and the players, they asked me thousands of questions,” he says.
“They wanted to know about me. They were very curious. They all welcomed me, said hi first, and shook my hand. I felt … adopted into this group.”
Ask around the Hawks and you’ll hear the same thing from the other side of the embrace.
Star big man Sam Froling — one of the club’s leaders — says the room changes when Kyu walks in.
“Whenever Q walks into the gym, everyone’s face lights up,” Sam says.
“He’s just got that energy.”
That lightness isn’t an act. Kyu carries gratitude like a passport.
“This life was my dream — studying overseas and working in a basketball team,” he says.
“I feel grateful every single day.”
Gratitude turned into friendship and friendship became family.
When Froling suffered his injury and couldn’t drive, Kyu moved in to help.
“He needed someone to take him to appointments,” Kyu says.
“I love driving. We became really good friends.”
He’s now living with Sam in his new place — a practical arrangement that’s grown into something deeper.
“Sam joked I’m ‘part of the furniture,’” Kyu grins. “I feel like home.
“Australians are more like a family.
“They’re very close. They hang out off the court. I think they are more like a family than Korea.”
Of course, there were cultural adjustments. He notes a certain four-letter word gets used differently here.
“Here, they use that word for close friends. Kind of culture shock,” he laughs, shaking his head.
The bigger adjustment was how quickly Wollongong felt like his place.
“The people are so gentle and respectful,” he says.
“I love nature — beaches and mountains. Except missing my family and our dog, this is my home.”
Kyu’s journey has tracked alongside a club that rediscovered its best self.
He arrived and in his first season around the team, the Hawks lifted a championship — a moment he describes as “very unique and special”.
He played as a guard in high school — “I passed a lot to Lee,” he jokes — but his gaze now is on the craft of coaching.
“One of my dreams is being a basketball coach in Korea,” he says.
“I want to stay here as long as possible, learn from advanced basketball and take it back to help improve Korean basketball.”
That dream sits alongside the everyday. He studies. He helps. He smiles. He swims at the beach and is teaching himself to bodysurf (“Not perfect yet”, he admits).
He’s developed a taste for Aussie coffee and he’s working on his Aussie vocabulary, colourful bits and all.
There’s a line he returns to that feels like the heart of this story, and of this club: “Dream big”.
“I was nothing, but I’m working at the best basketball team in Australia,” Kyu says.
“I couldn’t speak English at all. Now I can speak a little. If you dream big, you can do whatever you want.”
And there’s a line Froling offers that feels like the other half … “Q makes the place better,” Sam says.
In the end, that’s the Illawarra thing. A team that wins on the floor because it knows how to be good to each other off it.
A city that notices people, opens doors, and turns strangers into locals. A young man who came to visit a mate and found a home — and, in the process, held up a mirror to the Hawks’ culture and the community that sustains it.
Kyu’s story isn’t a headline grabber. It’s something gentler and truer.
It’s the quiet proof that what the Illawarra Hawks are building is bigger than a season. It’s a way of belonging — one handshake, one car ride, one smile at a time.
The Illawarra Hawks start #NBL26 as the defending champions and open the season with a home game against the Tasmanian JackJumpers on 27 September at the WIN Entertainment Centre, a game which will feature the Championship Banner Ceremony. Click here to get tickets.
