By: Riley Beveridge | AFL

Isabel Huntington will make her return from an ACL injury on Saturday after moving clubs and cities, and rediscovering her love for the game in the process.

THERE is something Isabel Huntington has forgotten.

“I can’t remember my pre-match routine,” she tells AFL.com.au.

“I should have written it down. Actually, I don’t know whether it worked anyway.”

She’ll need to remember it pretty quickly, though. Because, after 616 long and gruelling days filled with emotions ranging from doubt, to excitement, to acceptance, and just about everything in between, Huntington will be back playing in the AFLW this weekend.

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“It’s pretty weird, the thought of playing again,” Huntington says.

“It feels so foreign to you after being out for so long, it’s almost like you’re starting your career from scratch. You don’t know whether you’ll be able to perform as you did before. It just feels weird, you forget so much.”

The Giants told Huntington she would be making her long-awaited comeback during an impromptu team meeting held on Wednesday afternoon, her reward for more than 20 months’ worth of operations, rehabilitation, and conversations around whether she would even return at all.

“There are so many times when you think, do I just give up? Is it actually going to work out? Is it worth it? You get used to the idea of questioning your career at a really young age,” Huntington says.

But when the realisation hit for Huntington that she would finally make her comeback – and that she would be doing so in front of family and friends travelling up to Blacktown this Saturday when Greater Western Sydney hosts Richmond – the answer was yes. Yes, it was all worth it.

It was during an AFLW game on January 8, 2022, when Huntington ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament graft, most commonly referred to as the ‘ACL’, in her right knee. It was the second time that particular knee had failed her, and the third ACL injury Huntington had sustained in fewer than six years of football.

Dogs heartbreak as Huntington gets carried off

Isabel Huntington landed awkwardly and had to be carried off the ground with a suspected knee injury during the 2nd quarter

For the supremely talented and universally respected 24-year-old, a lot has changed in the time that has since elapsed. She’s at a new club, living in a new city, playing under a new coach, working in a new field, surrounded by new teammates and new experiences. She has left Melbourne’s football bubble, in doing so finding a newfound and richly deserved sense of balance in her life.

Leaving the Western Bulldogs, the club that drafted her with the No.1 pick in 2017 and provided the home for her first 20 AFLW games, was a gut-wrenching decision. But it was a necessary one, one that crystalised in the months after her most recent injury.

“She needed the change as a human being, not so much as a footballer,” Huntington’s manager, Alex Saundry, tells AFL.com.au.

Having undergone a third knee reconstruction in the weeks after her most recent injury, Huntington couldn’t turn on a TV, tune into radio station or even go to a local pub without seeing and hearing football everywhere. It was a constant reminder of what would be missing from her life for the next 20 months, as she started another brutally long period of rehabilitation.

May 4 2022

Get excited: Izzy Huntington set to become a Giant

Former number 1 pick Isabel Huntington makes the move to GWS

Huntington had long been tossing up a move to Sydney, where she had friends, family and a series of career opportunities. This was the perfect chance to finally pull the trigger. The Giants were interested, a trade was agreed, and one of the League’s most high-profile moves was completed.

“For Izzy, it’s always been about a little bit more than football,” Saundry says.

“Her decision, particularly around changing her environment, it was more about moving forward and progressing. The conversation had two elements to it, the personal life and then the need for a bit of a different challenge in terms of her living situation. To their credit, the Dogs were fantastic in their understanding of Izzy needing a bit of a fresh start as an individual.”

And so came the move to Sydney. For Huntington, it was the culmination of months of weighing up the pros and cons, of listening to advice, and of closely considering what she wanted from the next phase of her life. Ultimately, it wasn’t a football decision. After all she had been through, it couldn’t be.

“When you suffer an injury like this, you’re forced to shift your perspective a little bit and realise that footy can’t be everything. It can just get taken away from you in a split second,” Huntington says.

“After I did my third knee, I was certain that I just couldn’t prioritise footy as the biggest and sole thing that I will use as the decision-maker in my life. That was a really big factor in coming up here. It just really drives home how much you need other elements of your life. Footy isn’t and can’t be everything, unfortunately.

“Having it in your ears and on your screens 100 per cent of the time, it really just reinforces that you’re not playing and you’re on the sidelines. It’s genuinely refreshing up here, it’s that reminder that there’s more to life than a game.”

For Huntington, footy has never been everything. She is simply too gifted in too many other facets of her life. She had previously studied a Bachelor of Science at the University of Melbourne, completing an honours thesis building synthetic kidneys through 3D printings of patient scans for surgeons to train on. They’re studies she plans to resume after her comeback this season.

In Sydney, she has also found her purpose away from the field – but not entirely out of football – working as a player engagement manager for Footy for Climate, a non-for-profit organisation that seeks to push sustainable practices within the AFL. Huntington herself plays a crucial role in engaging with men’s and women’s players to further involve themselves in climate action and education.

“She’s such an incredible person,” Saundry says.

“Just seeing the frustration and the emotion she’s gone through in the past couple of years, it’s shattering. She’s got such an incredible ability to be one of the best footballers in the competition. It’s for no lack of trying, effort or talent. It’s actually just how her body has let her down, that’s factual.

“I’m just super proud of her resilience and her ability to make light out of the situation and find ways to keep investing in herself. It’ll be really emotional for me to watch her come back. I couldn’t be prouder of Isabel the footballer, but Isabel the person too.”

‘Isabel the person’ was introduced to her new Giants teammates by way of an all-club bonding activity. The premise, designed by the club’s new AFLW coach Cam Bernasconi, was for everyone to explain the reasons why they loved footy. For Huntington, her presentation was focused on celebrating the success of others regardless of how that success was defined.

Giants captain Alicia Eva, who has known Huntington for more than a decade after first coaching her as a 13-year-old while working in junior girls’ football programs, was moved by the presentation. For the club, it was an instant reflection of the person they had just recruited, not only the footballer.

“You could never question her love of the game,” Eva tells AFL.com.au.

“What we’ve always known about Izzy is that yes, she’s such a talent and she’s got such a strong game and adds so much. But you can tell she’s someone who just loves being in a team environment. Even in years gone by where she hasn’t been playing, she’s offered and contributed so much to that team environment just by being herself.

“For Izzy to get back, that’s success for her. For her to get back and play and enjoy football, a game she’s grown up loving, it’s incredibly important. That’s her ‘why’ and I can’t wait to celebrate that with her. She’s like a little sister to me. I love her very much and I’m really pumped for the weekend.”

All the while – amid study, work, moves and rehab – footy has bubbled away in the background for Huntington. It might no longer be the most central or defining part of her life, but it remains an important one.

She has found inspirations hard to come by during her recovery. After all, not many elite athletes have suffered three torn ACLs and returned to tell the story. But she was touched by a letter she received from Adelaide’s dual premiership star Marijana Rajcic, one of the few that has, while she has also formed a close bond with young teammate Isadora McLeay as the teenager completes her own recovery from a long-term knee injury.

The timing of Huntington’s most recent injury, combined with a decision to introduce dual AFLW seasons last year, meant she has essentially missed three campaigns. Meanwhile, a minor procedure to fix some cartilage damage in July has also forced a delayed start to the current season. But, after making it through a hastily arranged scrimmage match last week, she’s finally been given the green light. On Saturday, she will be back.

“I feel like it’s just a case of getting back out there,” Huntington says.

“I’ve got no idea if I can perform the way I did in previous seasons. It’ll hopefully come back to me pretty quickly. But I think, for the first few games at least, just getting a game under my belt and getting through will be really cool.

“I remember coming back from my last one, I think I had three disposals in my first three games. I was really just running around in circles like a headless chook, but it was just cool to get back out there.

“With ACLs, there’s the return-to-play and then the return-to-perform timelines. They’re pretty different, so it’s tricky. The competition has changed as well. It’s evolved so much. I’ve got no idea how I’m going to shape up against some of these new girls who have come in and started dominating.”

The Giants don’t have any concerns, though. After all, Huntington is a player who was crowned the AFLW’s Rising Star, named in its All-Australian team, and awarded the Dogs’ best and fairest in what was essentially her first full season in 2020. She had done all of that after being switched into an unnatural defensive role, as well.

Injury-cursed cousins band together

GWS midfielder Will Setterfield and Western Bulldogs forward Isabel Huntington speak to AFL.com.au as they recuperate from knee reconstructions

At her best, whether it’s forward or back, Huntington is genuinely among the best footballers in the AFLW competition. Having been starved of seeing such a talent for so long, her return is one that will undoubtedly be celebrated across the League.

“How exciting is that? That is the coolest thing,” Eva says.

“Still, to this day, when Izzy is at full throttle, she is one of the best players in the competition. That is super exciting. That’s why the club did take this gamble on her, for want of a better term. We recruited her while she was undertaking ACL rehab, but that was because of the person she is and also the footballer we know she can be. She is such a talent.”

For Huntington, though, all she wants is to be back out there. Saturday’s game in Blacktown will be the end of a long and frustrating, yet rewarding part of her football journey. Hopefully, it will also be the start of something special and sustained as well.

“I don’t know if I’ll be nervous or excited or indifferent,” Huntington says.

“I’ve become so acclimatised to not playing footy, it’s almost like I’m a staff member at this stage. It’s almost weird playing, for me, as opposed to being weird watching. I feel like I’m pretty well acclimatised to just watching.

“It’s probably good to reflect on the journey as well and I’m sure I will. It’s taken a lot to get here and I’d like to think it’s all going to be worth it, all of the tough times and all of the emotional ups and downs.

“But for now, it’ll be pretty cool to just be out there. It’s going to be sick.”

Chuck Culpepper | Washington Post

MELBOURNE, Australia — The story of Mason Cox thrums with a giddy torrent of are-you-kidding-me. It exceeds far-fetched, romps on past farcical and turns up at preposterous.

A 6-foot-11 engineering major who played soccer in high school, who played just 57 minutes across three seasons of basketball as a walk-on at Oklahoma State, who accepted a job at ExxonMobil in Houston around December 2013 and who never heard of Australian rules football until age 23 in 2014, has played 116 games in the roughhouse sport (which short-circuits many a career at single digits), has had 10 surgeries (six on eyes), has earned Australian citizenship and has felt the Australian accent take up happy residence, especially in his vowels.

He has spent offseasons climbing Machu Picchu (Peru), marveling at Patagonia (South America), roaming the Swiss Alps, exploring remote Australia and fly-fishing for brown rainbow trout in New Zealand. And as he starts this exalted month on the Australian sports calendar in the eight-team football “finals” as a mainstay in the position of ruck with the famed and top-seeded Collingwood club, he is famous here while remaining decidedly unfamous where he grew up, 15 time zones away.

“Makes no sense,” he begins one day at lunch in a swell cafe in Richmond, a funky inner suburb of Melbourne.

It makes no sense, but some gawk unmistakably during that dinner at the Melbourne icon Chin Chin, while others gawk intermittently as guileful gawkers, while others don’t gawk at all because it’s a metropolis of 5 million with varied cultural vigor even as it’s bonkers for sports. A waitress quickly states, “I appreciate what you do.”

A fan outside the Melbourne Cricket Ground five nights earlier didn’t gawk per se; he just about jumped out of his skin at the sight of Cox coming around the bend after a comfortable win to close what Americans would call the regular season. (He got a photo.) The man at the dry cleaners doesn’t gawk, but he does revel and chatter upon Cox’s arrival.

It makes no sense, but a friend recently told Cox he has “the perfect setup”: celebrity perks in Australia, anonymity elsewhere. “I don’t think many people play in front of 80,000 people,” Cox says, “and have the ability to fly a few hours and nobody knows who you are.” Trips to America grant a fame “detox,” when he can walk a bonanza of humanity such as Sixth Street in Austin or go to a Dallas Mavericks game with only rare moments of someone walking by and saying, “Oh, my God, what are you doing here?” — that someone invariably being Australian.

Somehow, the same Mason Cox whose devoted parents would drive the seven-hour round trip to Oklahoma State “just to see me hanging out on the bench and watch the ‘Kiss Cam,’ ” wound up in places such as the Paddock Club at Melbourne’s annual Formula One shindig.

“I go there every year,” he says, “and I’m like: ‘I have no right or reason to be here. I’m a broke-ass college basketball player, and I’m just hanging out on the pit lane. Why am I here? How am I here? How does this happen?’ ”

It happens weirdly.

‘We just showed up’

Jeanette and Phillip Cox met at college when both arrived late for chemistry class and the professor assigned them as lab partners, raised three sons who sprouted to 6-6 (Nolan), 6-8 (Austin) and the 6-11 baby Mason, whose six-inch growth the summer before his senior year in high school prompted schoolmates to say, “What the f— did you eat?”

Mason followed Nolan to Oklahoma State and walked around as your everyday 6-11 engineering student. He wound up helping the women’s basketball team practice, which included simulating Baylor’s Brittney Griner. The men’s coaches found him, brought him to practice and handed him some ankle braces, causing a delay because he did not know how to put them on.

He also did not know how to check into a game, so the first time he tried, someone behind the scorer’s table had to tell him to quit obstructing the view and kneel the hell down. He played in three games in 2011-12, eight in 2012-13 and 13 in 2013-14. He took three shots and made two. He took 10 free throws and made three. He “could barely make a layup,” he says, and dreaded pregame left-hand-layup drills. He did go in against Kansas in 2014 and get two stops against Joel Embiid, loosing a ruckus in the crowd and foretelling his fondness for a good, hard scrap.

As Marcus Smart’s Oklahoma State lost, 85-77, to Gonzaga in the NCAA tournament’s round of 64 in San Diego 2014, Cox played a whopping 10 of his 57 total college minutes. Broadcasters marveled at how he had never played organized basketball until 2½ years prior, which caught the attention of Jonathan Givony, the basketball prospects guru with Australian connections. That led to a puzzling call to Cox from Oklahoma State media relations, which led to a free trip to Los Angeles for a combine of a faraway sport.

“We just showed up, did the 3K time trial on a random track with, like, an adult league soccer game going on in the middle of it, and there were, like, grandmas in their rockers, walking on the track,” Cox says. “And we were, like, running a time for a 3K time trial. We’re having to, like, run around other people just going for a casual stroll on a Sunday.”

They tried the vital Australian art of kicking, but then: “Basketball players don’t really have hand-to-foot coordination, so you can imagine how many footballs went left, right, center, hit people in the face, all this other stuff. Like, absolute chaos.”

Two things favored Cox: height and soccer, the latter having decorated his minor years with an abundance of travel, including abroad. Endurance matters deeply in the harshness of Australian rules football; players can run a half-marathon per match. Soon came brother Nolan acting as agent and fielding phone calls from Australian clubs at wee hours. Soon came a why-not free trip to Australia.

“We took those two weeks,” Mason says, “and just walked around like absolute idiots, not knowing what to expect. And found out the game was real, found out people were into it, with massive crowds and massive following and stuff here, and got plastered all over the media and everything else.”

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They did a news conference.

“I was a walk-on in college,” Mason says. “I never did a press conference in my life. I guess people didn’t understand I wasn’t like a big person in sport back in America. This was like some guy who scrubbed the bottom of the barrel.”

It made no sense and led to a momentous brotherly conversation near a boathouse on Port Phillip Bay just beneath Melbourne. Nolan, five years older, advised Mason that his youth allowed ample time for mounting this wild stallion of an adventure. Mason signed with the Magpies of Collingwood, a club whose stature often results in being translated into American as “Dallas Cowboys” or “New York Yankees.”

He lived as a novelty with a give-it-three-years mind-set. He rode the rapids of resentment from those who wondered why an interloper might supplant some Australian who had slept dreaming with a football as a kid (even though Irish interlopers from Gaelic football had done likewise). He learned in the minors this game played on a gigantic oval with many, many players (18 on each side). He aimed for the largest stadium in the Southern Hemisphere, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, surrounded by statues of legends he knew not, such as cricketers Shane Warne and Sir Donald Bradman, or footballers Ron Barassi and Leigh Matthews. He debuted there for Collingwood in 2016 and scored a goal (six points) on his first kick 80 seconds in as the tallest player ever in the AFL and the second American — following Jason Holmes, who played in five games between 2014 and 2017.

He didn’t star, but he didn’t fade, either.

He played the position called ruck, which “doesn’t need as much of a skill set as other players,” he says, which rewards height and which, he says, requires three foremost talents: jumping, wrestling (as for catches called marking) and tapping the ball to teammates. He says, “Essentially your goal is to give it to other people,” and, “I don’t have to be the best kicker, the best handball.”

He loved the banging, “to have this one-on-one battle: Who can push their body further?” He loved that push: “Playing basketball, we did some crazy runs and crazy conditioning, stuff like that, and I thought, like, ‘Oh, man, my body could never go any further than that.’ But then I came to the AFL and I was like, ‘Holy s—, there’s a whole ’nother level to this!’ ” He reckoned the sport a mash of every other sport: “I genuinely do believe it’s the hardest sport in the world.”

Finding home

At a recent Collingwood match, a 101-31 wipeout of Essendon before 74,344 on a Friday night when at least one Essendon fan upturned a table on his way out, four-decade Collingwood fan Dave Skinner of Sydney wore a Cox No. 46 jersey with “USA! USA!” along the back. An air-freight manager for airline Qantas who flies around the vast country watching Collingwood, Skinner started wearing the shirt to support Cox and his story — and to needle a friend who had needled Skinner about supporting Cox.

“He’s taken a chance that really very few are given,” Skinner says, “and it perhaps helps that he was put into the Collingwood system. … And to remain in that AFL [roster], he’s got to work hard and got to prove himself as well. He’s not just there for the novelty to sell merchandise or to get media attention.” He praises Cox’s determination, speaks of his knack for ruck and says, “We can’t really ask more of him than that, and on the days he has the breakout games it’s even better.”

The utmost breakout came at the 2018 “preliminary final” against Richmond, similar to an NFL conference championship game, in which a Collingwood upset thwarted a fourth straight Richmond title. “Cox tore the game away from the Tigers,” Sarah Black wrote for Collingwood, “in a withering three-goal burst to open the second quarter, putting the Pies up by 42 and inviting a chant of ‘USA! USA!’ to envelop the MCG.”

He has had downturns, as when playing time waned in 2021, and he has had comebacks, as with 32 games the past two seasons and a fresh two-year contract extension just cemented.

He also has had surgeries, including one on the eyes that left him bedridden for two weeks in a dark room without seeing and one last March on the spleen. The former helped usher in his distinction as the first AFL player in goggles. The latter involved a half-gallon of blood lost before the surgery, one-third of his spleen lost during and one ear chewed out afterward from a caller in Texas, who stated her objection to learning of her son’s surgeries through media reports.

“It’s just such a brutal game,” Cox says. “Your body’s not meant to be able to take that kind of impact. And knowing that, you go in there knowing you’re going to be under the knife quite a few times.” So: “Everyone’s always got something that’s somewhat injured. No one’s sitting there going, ‘I feel the freshest I’ve ever felt.’ No one ever says that.”

It makes no sense but bears such fruits. He treasures the “skin name” he got from the Juru tribe — “Banbari” — an honor from indigenous Australians who recognized his passion for their cause. He values Australians’ capacity for realness, including calling friends without embarrassment to report blues or depression. He relishes the multinational Thanksgiving he and a dozen or so friends hold each early December, going around the table, telling of their past 365 days and often crying. He adores Australia as a new citizen starting to say “we” instead of “they.”

“Australia’s kind of like a golden nugget that no one really thinks about, you know?” he says. “It’s a beautiful culture. It’s first-world, amazing lifestyle. I think two or three of the cities are, like, in the top 10 most livable cities in the world. … So it’s interesting because people come down here and they’re like: ‘Oh! I get it! I understand why you haven’t left! I wouldn’t, either!’ But then I’m fortunate enough with football to be able to get back for two months a year and go see family and spend my time in the U.S. and have that feeling of home. But the longer I’m here, probably the more I see myself being here a long time.”

After all, nine years after finishing with sports, he walks Melbourne sidewalks on a winter night in late August 2023, pointing out the hotel with the legendary bellhops, chatting briefly with a police officer and using the word “utopia” — a walking, towering demonstration of how life can be at its best when it makes no sense.