The Age
6 October, 2016
Emma Quayle
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Mitch McCarthy didn't realise how much he truly loved football until he was living on the other side of the world and couldn't watch a game on television, let alone kick a ball around.
The teenager spent six months last year living in California, going to high school, cramming in even more classes online and playing basketball in front of college scouts and coaches.
He went there feeling like basketball owned all of his heart but finished the year with four things: offers from three colleges and the knowledge that what he really wanted to do was come home.
"There were a few factors," said McCarthy, who arrived back in Melbourne on Christmas Day with his parents and older sister, who moved to the US with him and were living a few hours away in San Diego.
One was fatigue. High school in LA was fun; there was homecoming, and the prom, "just like all the TV shows." But to qualify for college McCarthy had to be extremely disciplined and do hour upon hour of catching up.
Completing all the core subjects he needed meant spending all day at school then going home to do more work in his own time, in between training and playing for Village Christian High School.
He did 400 hours of online study in one semester, on top of everything else. "It was good for me and it made me work hard and be organised, but it also took a toll," he said. "I never really got a rest. By the end, it was really full-on."
The second thing McCarthy knew was that he was a little bit homesick; even though his family was just a four-hour drive away, he was seeing them once a month or less.
On top of that, there was footy; he made his mind up just as a number of players from his team the Dandenong Stingrays - Jacob Weitering, Kieran Collins, Brandon White - became AFL draftees last November.
"More than anything, I really missed footy. I was starved of it," said McCarthy.
"Every time I saw someone kick an American footy or I kicked one myself it would bring back memories and I couldn't even watch the game on TV, so being that far away made me see how much I loved it.
"I thought about it a lot and decided I really wanted to have a shot at it, and see what I could do."
McCarthy made a quick impression, despite his late start. He is tall, he loves to run and he can jump.
His biggest challenge was to re-learn how the game is played - "it changes so much from the under-16s to the under-18s, I had never heard of structures before" - a process that wasn't helped when he suffered a navicular stress fracture just nine games in, one week after he had felt like he might just be starting to work the whole thing out.
It was tough. "It was heartbreaking and at first I was thinking, 'year over, career over, everything over," said McCarthy, who let his foot rest for 12 weeks and recently started running again.
He won't be able to do any of the testing at this week's combine - a frustration, because he wanted to get a sense of where he might fit in - but will step up his running in the next few weeks.
"It's 100 per cent now. I jumped to conclusions at first, but it was a tiny, tiny crack and everything that's happened since and everything I've been told about it has been very reassuring."
When he came back from America, some clubs wondered whether they might have been able to sign McCarthy as a category b rookie. They couldn't; the few under-16 games he played for the Stringrays meant he was not eligible.
More recently he has been nominated by St Kilda as an indigenous prospect the club may get to list as a next generation academy rookie, should he be overlooked in next month's national draft.
It was only a few years ago - when previously unknown siblings of his mother started calling her to introduce themselves - that she and the family began to learn more about where they had come from.
"It all came out of the blue. People were out there putting together the family history and one day someone rang her saying, 'I think I'm your sister," McCarthy said.
"My mum is one of 10, now. One of my uncles is an elder and I love catching up with him because he's just like a book, with all the history he throws at you.
"It's still very new and my knowledge on it is pretty limited, but my mum can talk about it all for hours. It's something I'm very interested in getting involved with and learning a lot more about."
Last Modified on 26/10/2016 21:04
