Injury ally helping ease the burden
TOP AFL Women’s draft pick Nina Morrison has an ally in an opponent that knows her ACL heartbreak all too well.
No surgery plans have been discussed as yet after the teenage Cat was felled at training last Thursday with a torn ACL that ended her debut season after just one electric game.
Last year’s No.1 pick Isabel Huntington — who ruptured her ACL for the second time in Round 2 last season and is yet to play in AFLW03 after a preseason setback — said she had been exchanging messages with her Geelong counterpart in recent days, describing her as a “strong character”.
“I’m shattered for her,” Huntington said.
“It takes a while for it to sink in and she said to me that it was pretty surreal and that it hadn’t really sunk in for her, and it will take a while.
“It’s obviously different for everyone … I said to let herself feel the emotions if she needs to, because it’s obviously something that’s really tough to go through and she doesn’t need to be tough all the time.
“It’s the waiting period between doing it and having surgery where you’re sort of stuck in the middle a bit. That might be tough for her.”
The Western Bulldog said the prospect of her own return would be “best case” in three weeks but maintained that there would be no rush, and missing the entire season had not been ruled out.
“We’ve been taking it pretty conservatively, just because it’s obviously high-risk and we want to mitigate that,” Huntington said. “I’m aiming for the back half of the season. Round 5 if I pass all the tests needed, but there’s a few things I need to tick off until then.
“It could be Round 6, it could be Round 7, could be next year. We’re just waiting to see. But Round 5 would probably be best-case.”
At just 19 years of age and having endured two knee reconstructions, Huntington admitted she had done more research than most on the topic, but backed league research in the area after a horror spate of ACL injuries in recent weeks.
“There’s no overnight solution to it, unfortunately,” she said. “The anatomy of females is one of the risk factors and makes us a lot more susceptible to it, which obviously we can’t change.
“I think we can do things in terms of strengthening programs, and the research that the AFL is doing at the minute with Latrobe Uni is really good — just to identify why it’s happening and to implement programs to try and prevent it.
“Some things we can’t really prevent which is unfortunate, but hopefully in time it will become better and the rates will drop a little bit.”
Cats ruck Aasta O’Connor had scans on a knee injury yesterday with results expected today.