Seven years is a lifetime in the music industry. For most people, it's the entire duration of a university degree and a first job. For Christopher Bahng, it was the distance between a 13-year-old kid in Sydney and the leader of a global phenomenon.
Honestly, when we talk about Bang Chan pre debut, we aren't just talking about a training period. We’re talking about a survival story. While his peers were going to prom and worrying about math finals, Chan was navigating the high-pressure hallways of JYP Entertainment in Seoul, watching his closest friends debut and leave him behind. It’s a bit of a miracle he didn’t just pack his bags and head back to Australia.
The Sydney Audition That Changed Everything
Life in Australia was pretty normal for young Chris. He was a competitive swimmer. He actually broke a school record for the 50m freestyle when he was only eight. His dad was a swimming coach, so that world was his whole life until music started pulling him in a different direction.
In 2010, JYP held a global audition in Australia. It wasn’t some grand stage—it was basically a local search. About 800 kids showed up. Chan sang "Just the Way You Are" by Bruno Mars while playing guitar. He was the only one who passed.
The story goes that the JYP scouts were so intrigued they actually went to his house afterward to see more. He played piano, he showed them some dance moves he’d learned at the Newton High School of the Performing Arts, and that was it. By April 2011, he was on a plane to South Korea. He was 13. Can you imagine? Moving to a different country alone at that age is basically a movie plot.
The Lonely Years of a "Forever Trainee"
People often forget that Bang Chan pre debut was a name synonymous with "waiting." He trained for seven years. To put that in perspective:
- He saw GOT7 debut in 2014.
- He saw DAY6 debut in 2015.
- He saw TWICE debut in 2015.
Most of the members of those groups were his best friends. He used to play hide-and-seek with BamBam. He shared a room with Shownu (who later moved to Starship and debuted in Monsta X). He was practically a fixture at the agency. There were times he felt "lost," a word he’s used in interviews to describe the feeling of watching everyone else's dreams come true while he stayed stuck in the practice room.
During this time, he wasn't just sitting around. He appeared as a backup dancer in TWICE’s "Like Ooh-Ahh" music video (he was the zombie!) and in Miss A’s "Only You." If you go back and watch those videos now, it's like a weird Easter egg hunt. He was always there, lurking in the background, waiting for his turn.
The Birth of 3RACHA: Creating a Blueprint
By 2016, something shifted. Chan realized that if he wanted to debut, he needed to prove he was more than just a good dancer or a decent singer. He started producing.
He teamed up with two younger trainees, Seo Changbin and Han Jisung. They called themselves 3RACHA. This wasn't some polished, company-driven project. This was three kids in a dorm room making beats on a laptop. They used aliases: Chan was CB97, Changbin was SPEARB, and Han was J.ONE.
They uploaded mixtapes to SoundCloud. Songs like "Matryoshka" and "Broken Compass" weren't just "trainee songs"—they were raw, aggressive, and technically impressive. This period is the actual foundation of what Stray Kids became. They weren't waiting for a producer to give them a song; they were building their own sound from scratch.
Why the "Hand-Picked" Narrative Matters
Here is where the Bang Chan pre debut story gets unique. Usually, a K-pop company picks the members, puts them in a room, and says, "You’re a group now."
With Stray Kids, JYP Entertainment (the man and the company) did something different. They told Chan to form his own team. He wasn't just the leader by age; he was the architect. He chose the members—Minho, Changbin, Hyunjin, Han, Felix, Seungmin, and I.N—because he’d worked with them in evaluations and knew they had the right chemistry.
The Survival Show and the Final Hurdle
When the Stray Kids survival show aired in 2017, the stakes were terrifyingly high. It wasn't "trainee vs. trainee" like most shows. It was "The Team vs. JYP."
There’s a famous scene where Chan has to watch Felix and Lee Know get eliminated. It’s hard to watch. He looks genuinely devastated, probably because he felt responsible for bringing them into the project in the first place. He’d spent years being the one left behind, and now he was watching his hand-picked brothers get cut.
Luckily, we know how that ended. They were brought back, and the nine-member lineup was finalized. But that pressure? That shaped who he is as a leader today.
What You Can Learn from the Long Wait
Looking back at the timeline, it's clear that Chan’s "failure" to debut with GOT7 or DAY6 was actually a setup for something bigger. If he had debuted earlier, he might have just been a member of a group. By waiting, he became a producer, a mentor, and a leader who literally owns his group's creative direction.
Practical Takeaways from Bang Chan's Journey:
- Persistence isn't just "staying." It's evolving. Chan spent his "waiting" years learning production and MIDI, not just practicing the same dance.
- Build your own door. When the company didn't give him a debut, he and 3RACHA created a sound that was impossible to ignore.
- Loyalty pays off. His commitment to the members he chose created a group bond that is notoriously strong in the industry.
If you’re ever feeling like you’re "behind" in life, just remember the kid from Sydney who spent seven years in a basement before he ever got a chance to stand in the light.
To really understand the music Stray Kids makes today, you have to go back to those SoundCloud tracks from 2017. Search for 3RACHA's "J:/2017/mixtape." It's all there—the frustration, the ambition, and the talent that eventually forced the world to pay attention. You can literally hear the hunger in their voices. That’s the real legacy of the pre-debut era.