Get to know the next wave of talent<\/a><\/p>\n“When I was 16, I got shepherded off the ball playing League (WAFLW), and twisted my ankle somehow. We didn’t think it was that bad, I was walking around on it for a few weeks, but we finally got an MRI,” D’Addario told\u00a0AFL.com.au.<\/p>\n
“I did all my ligaments, and there was a fracture in the joint. It ruled me out of all the under-16 champs and training with the 18s as an underager.<\/p>\n
“Then last year, I had most of my WAFLW season, but just before finals and the under-18 champs, I broke my hip in a tackle. It was frustrating, it was the worst timing.”<\/p>\n
Carys D’Addario running during the Telstra AFLW National Draft Combine on October 3, 2025. Picture: AFL Photos<\/p>\n
While she escaped surgery for the hip injury, D’Addario wasn’t able to run for three months.<\/p>\n
“It wasn’t displaced. But the type of fracture I had, you don’t normally see it in footballers, you kind of see it in car accidents, or if you’re old and have a fall. It was hard to rehab, because no one had seen it before (in a football context), so I had to sit and wait, literally, till I felt okay to do something,” D’Addario said.<\/p>\n
“Luckily enough, one day I woke up and it was just, no pain. Before that, I was on crutches for a few weeks, and I did a bit of swimming, but running was the big thing I couldn’t do for a long time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“It was my last year of school, I couldn’t do the aths carnival and all the fun things, but it made me focus more on my schoolwork.”<\/p>\n
Such was D’Addario’s form in the first half of the year, she got the call-up to play in the All-Stars team against the Marsh AFLW Academy.<\/p>\n
Carys D\u2019Addario in action during the match between AFL National Academy Girls and U23 All Stars at Whitten Ovalon June 8, 2025. Picture: AFL Photos<\/p>\n
“It was really satisfying, because I felt like I’d missed out on so much, and finally got a chance to put myself out there,” she said.<\/p>\n
“The goal this year was to get some continuity and play out the season, and once I got a couple of games under my belt, it was ‘Let’s really dig in here’.<\/p>\n
“I was happy to go away at the national championships and show my talents, and I felt like I had a consistent season as well. I want my teammates to know what they’re going to get from me every game.”<\/p>\n
Carys Daddario in action during the 2025 Marsh AFL National Development Championships match between Western Australia and Queensland at RSEA Park. Picture: AFL Photos<\/p>\n
Having graduated, D’Addario has started a pharmacy degree, with the plan to go part-time once drafted, while she coaches football and basketball at her former high school.<\/p>\n
The West Coast supporter watches footy closely, looking up to various attributes of players to model her own game \u2013 Georgie Prespakis’ cleanliness, Charlie Rowbottom’s strength and Scott Pendlebury’s smarts.<\/p>\n
In her previous sporting life, she was an all-rounder playing cricket at state level, but her “heart was always in footy”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Even when I was really young, playing Auskick with the boys, that last year of Auskick was when they announced AFLW. I always knew, even before then, that I wanted to play AFL and be the first girl to play AFL (men’s),” she said.<\/p>\n
“But it was reassuring that there was an actual pathway to get into, no one questions playing, and everyone’s for it, whether it’s footy, cricket or soccer.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Carys Daddario is tackled during the 2025 Marsh AFL National Championships match between Allies and Western Australia at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":335665,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85,83],"class_list":{"0":"post-335664","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-afl","8":"tag-afl","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-australian-football-league","12":"tag-australianfootballleague","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-text"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335664\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}