PORT MORESBY – As the 15th Pacific Games wrapped up in PNG there were signs that a sporting revolution might just have begun in the developing Pacific country, spearheaded by a young Australian sports coach.

The national anthem of Papua New Guinea rang out 90 times for PNG’s gold medal winners during the Pacific Games, heralding unprecedented sporting success for the region’s most populous nation.

The PNG team was the largest ever to represent the country but, more significantly, the best prepared.

And at the helm – the Australian volleyball player Aaron Alsop.

Impressed by his work as a coach of the national team, PNG’s national Olympic committee offered him the much bigger role of heading up a High-Performance Centre (HPC).

He first offered his services in his own sport at the Pacific Mini Games in 2013.

“We needed somewhere for the athletes to create an ongoing training programme, a daily training environment,” Alsop told the ABC,

“Back when I started we had no idea where they were, what they were doing, when they were training. They had no sports science, sports medicine support at all.”

Before the HPC opened, most of PNG’s elite athletes never considered what they were eating or whether hydration was important.

Warm up and recovery protocols were not part of their routine.

“A lot of them – 90 per cent of them – had never seen a gym in their life.

“Right now the athletes – we can monitor them training seven days a week.

“Now we’re working with around 1000 athletes a week in 28 sports, as well as 150 coaches and managers.

“We want to get away from the idea that Pacific island athletes just turn up, put their shoes on and play.”

The impact of the high-performance centre was almost immediate. As the months ticked down to the games, confidence was growing in the PNG camp.

Take power lifter Linda Paulson from Manus Island, for example: “I want my family to see that I can do something. So I have to. I do good training here in the high-performance training centre.

“Here in PNG I will compete in home ground and I will have more support. So I know that I will get more strength to compete and I’m happy. I’m ready.

Ready was she ever. After carrying her nation’s flag at the opening ceremony, Linda went on to win her event and set a new world record.

And as PNG continued to rack up gold after gold, the other nations wanted to know – how had they done it?

Alsop said: “I’ve had just about every single country approach us and just ask, you know, ‘what have you done with your athletes? You know, they’re looking great, looking fit, healthy and ready’.

“And I think the good thing about that for the athletes is that they came into the games with a good sense of confidence. Not an arrogance or anything but just a confidence in their preparation.

And the way that that has converted into results in the games has been excellent.”

Such has been Alsop’s success as high-performance director that talk around the Pacific is of more centres opening – and perhaps even an Oceania Institute of Sport to mirror the Australia Institute of Sport, which has transformed Australia’s sporting landscape over the last 40 years.

PNG’s Sports Minister, Justin Tkatchenko, couldn’t be more pleased and even before the Pacific Games were over he was talking about his country hosting a future Commonwealth Games.

“Over the next 10 years, we’re going to see some world champions come out of PNG because of the efforts that the government and themselves have put in with this new facility.

“Our government is committed to ensure that we continue to fund and assist for the long-term benefit of sports in PNG.

“Until now the only way forward for PNG’s best was to head overseas – and usually to Australia, like swimmer Ryan Pini, a veteran of five Pacific Games, who added seven more golds to his collection in Moresby.

“And the queen of the track, Toea Wisil, collected three gold, including an emotional run in the 100 metres final.”

Wisil’s coach is Sharon Hannan, who for 14 years plotted the golden career of Australia’s champion hurdler Sally Pearson.

In terms of raw talent, Sharon says Toea too has the ability to mix it with the best.

“If she was an unbelievably committed athlete and never missed a session, I’d guarantee that she could run 10.8 and she could mix it with the Americans and the Jamaicans.

“But she comes from a different culture and, you know, they don’t see things like that as an absolute priority.”

But with the advent of a high-performance centre in her own country and now the best sporting facilities in the region to go with it, the culture of sport in PNG may be about to change and the government, in time-honoured sporting fashion, has raised the bar.

Sports Minister Tkatchenko: “When I started two-and-a-half years ago, sports was in trouble. The games were in trouble. Government made a big, bold decision to get the bull by the horns and take it and make it work for PNG, make it work for the Pacific Games and make it happen.”

The Pacific Games Council says the 2015 Games in Port Moresby surpassed all expectations.

Its executive director, Andrew Minogue, said the Commonwealth Games is a logical next step.

“We all understand that Papua New Guinea has some ambitions to host other international events following these 2015 Games and we also understand that, compared to the other countries in the Pacific, they have a much bigger population base and a bigger need for the local communities to have sporting facilities of this magnitude.

“So there’s an ambition here in Port Moresby that other Pacific Island hosts just don’t have, and it’s absolutely realistic for PNG to have that goal around the Commonwealth Games and other international events.”