Dan McStay speaks to Glenn McFarlane about his ACL return and belief in Collingwood
Robbed of a premiership by injury, Dan McStay spent Grand Final week doing everything he could to support his teammates — until it all became too much. He opens up to GLENN MCFARLANE.
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Dan McStay was setting ambitious goals and doing the maths in his head almost as soon as the hammer blow of reality hit home.
His left knee had just given way and gone “pop” when changing direction in his second pre-season session – during a routine training drill – at Victoria Park on the last day of November.
It was the opposite knee to the one that had cruelly wrenched him out of Collingwood’s premiership team two months earlier.
That one had been medial ligament damage and cost him the medal he had desperately been chasing; this one was entirely different.
This was likely going to cost him a whole season, maybe even a chance of chasing the success that had been denied him in 2023.
Even before the scans came back, this had the hallmarks of a ruptured ACL, which most assumed would keep the key forward out for the entire 2024 season.
The calendar weeks and months ahead looked bleak – and time was his likely enemy.
👋 Checking in with Dan McStay, two months into his knee rehab. pic.twitter.com/FQ2lWqD1Sh
— Collingwood FC (@CollingwoodFC) February 3, 2024
But even as McStay consoled his tearful partner Kellie and his shattered father, Trevor, that night at his inner-city home, he assured them he wasn’t going to waste an hour, not even a minute, if it meant playing football in 2024.
As his mind initially whirled between disappointment and disbelief after a challenging first season with Collingwood, he had the foresight to start mapping out a path forward.
Thankfully, those around him not only subscribed to it, they enhanced the plan and set to work on making it happen.
A ‘game plan’ meeting with Collingwood’s high performance manager Jarrod Wade, and subsequent chats with the club’s rehabilitation manager Dean Filopoulos, set the scene for them to safely but strategically push the boundaries for a traditional ACL return.
And with surgeon Julian Feller on board, this ‘team operation’ was going to focus on his knee solely, rather than the time frame from which ACL returns had always been measured.
“Dean, Jarrod and I had a pretty strong plan in place,” McStay recounted this week in an exclusive interview with the Sunday Herald Sun.
“Wadey kind of said to me: ‘I have dealt with a lot of ACLs in the past and we are going to attack it as hard as we can. If we hit a point mid-season where we are probably not where we want to be, we might look at a different goal’.
“If footy wasn’t going to work out this year, we thought I might do a triathlon or something like that, where you can still get your competitive edge.
“I knew I was training for something (a footy return or a triathlon). But as we kept hitting all of the markers we wanted to hit and I didn’t have any setbacks, I was always a chance to play.”
Fast forward to Saturday, and McStay, 29, will play his fifth game of the season – and his 180th overall – against his old side Brisbane Lions.
His triathlon days will have to wait.
His return to football has been one of the most uplifting stories of Collingwood’s tough premiership defence in 2024.
The Magpies appear certain to miss finals, but McStay has worked his way into the best physical shape of his career, which has given him and his club great hope for next year.
“I mean a lot of people kind of told me that I wouldn’t be playing footy this year, so just to be able to be back playing and doing what I love and competing at the highest level is a genuine achievement for myself,” he said. “We’ve still got some good footy to play this year.”
CHALLENGING TIMES
McStay hadn’t reckoned on how challenging his first year in black and white would be after leaving Brisbane.
He was solid but unspectacular in the first five weeks of last season, with fans slow to warm to what he was bringing to the forward line.
He then suffered a flexor tendon injury in his finger and missed a swag of games, but turned his form around significantly in the second half of the season
“I love the fans, they are so passionate,” he said this week. “They made me earn it (their respect). I did cop it a bit early on, but hopefully by just competing and showing what you can do, you can win them over. I hope I’ve been able to do that.”
“So many of those fans come down to training every day and I try to make sure after every session I go over and speak to them and sign autographs. I want to show them that I am human, that I am not just a number on the back of a jumper or a name on a stats sheet.”
His teammates know Collingwood wouldn’t have made the grand final last year without McStay. His forward impact and his two goals in each of the qualifying final and preliminary final wins against Melbourne and Greater Western Sydney were critical returns.
Heartbreakingly his knee injury in the game against the Giants meant he was never going to be right to play in the grand final.
But as devastated as he was, he resolved to keep a positive attitude to help his teammates prepare.
He went to the meetings; he offered insight where it was needed; but the one bridge too far for him was to take part in the grand final parade.
“They (Collingwood) asked me if I wanted to do the parade and I said: ‘No way’.” he said. “Everything else, I tried to feel as if I was a part, even though you are not really a part of it on the day. I was so happy for the boys, but yeah it was a very tough period of time for me.”
The support he received from partner Kellie, his parents Trevor and Debby, from his family, his teammates, his coaches, and the Collingwood club as a whole, is something he won’t ever forget.
That support was required again … within the space of two months.
“We had a chat about not putting a ceiling on this.â€
— Collingwood FC (@CollingwoodFC) July 10, 2024
👀 Go inside the huddle as Dan McStay’s return to football is announced to the team, seven months after he ruptured his ACL: pic.twitter.com/ptc1nyZe96
‘LET’S GET TO WORK’
As unlucky as McStay was when his knee buckled last November, there was one part of it that he can be thankful for.
It was a clean ACL tear, with little or no damage around it.
“I just did my ACL … it was a clean break, really,” he said. “A lot of guys have pretty much a car crash (damage) in their knees and they have to wait for everything else to heal.
“I was lucky in that sense. The surgeon said if you are going to do your ACL, this is the way you want to do it. It helps with the recovery time.”
He got to work with Wade and Filopoulos almost immediately, with a program of different activities and philosophies.
“Wadey and Dean were fantastic,” he said. “Dean really thinks outside the box, and a lot of their philosophies come from different sports.
“Gymnasts are incredible athletes, track stars are incredible athletes, and anything you can learn from those athletes is very beneficial, whether that is the jump or landing from the trampoline or training on the sprung floor.
“It’s almost like on those matts you can run without the load of your full body, so that the joints of your knee are not taking the full body weight.”
McStay had seen footballers recovering from ACLs left to do repetitive work on the stationary bikes – he wanted a different challenge.
“I saw them spend a lot of time on the stationary bike or the grinder and I didn’t want that to be me. I saw those guys hating it. I wanted to make sure I was doing different things, not just sitting on a bike or being on the grinder and watching teammates train.”
TEAM McSTAY
He marvels at the support he received, at home with Kellie, and also from his parents, and inside the four walls at the AIA Centre.
“Kel has been such a warrior,” McStay said of his partner. “She was someone I could lean on every day and I definitely wouldn’t have been able to get through the process without venting to her. We would just go for walks every morning and just talk.”
“Mum and Dad were great. They were probably the ones who were saying: ‘make sure you don’t come back too early’
“But I told them, ‘I have got this whole team around me who are making the decisions’.
“(Surgeon) Julian Feller … was open about previous injuries he had seen. He spoke about soccer players who have been returning in six months. He thinks there is a new way of looking at the time frames to get back.
“Everyone from the surgeon, to the physios to the medical, conditioning and rehab staff was in agreement on what we had to do to get back. It has all been very calculating and very planned.”
What a moment! 🥰
— Collingwood FC (@CollingwoodFC) July 13, 2024
Dan McStay kicks the first goal of the day in his first match in 295 days, and didn't our squad love it to open today's VFL clash! pic.twitter.com/fPreThY0hl
McStay squatted at three weeks post surgery; ran at 10 weeks and broke a personal best for maximum speed at three months.
He believes his positive mindset helped.
“I was pretty much in the gym every single day of rehab,” he said. “I was told ‘You won’t be able to return to footy until your quad mass is similar to the other leg.
“So I sat on the leg extension every day and just tried to build my leg strength back.
“There was a bit of a running joke that I needed to pay rent to the club because I was in there that often.”
His biggest sessions usually came on game day for the Magpies.
“You have to find little positives and little wins along the way, and that’s what I was concentrating on,” he said.
“But when the boys were under the pump losing three in a row at the start of the season, they had the external pressure of performance and weight of expectation on their shoulders, and I was just working away on a program.”
He worked at times in rehab with the likes of first-year Magpie Harry DeMattia, who was out for an extended period with a finger issue, and alongside Collingwood AFLW player Kalinda Howarth, who was recovering from an ACL.
The hardest point came at the four to five month mark of rehab.
“You are so far into your rehab and you have hit a point where you are running (flat out) but you can’t join in the footy.
“It was the early morning grind that I found the hardest then. But once I hit that six month mark, I knew there was light at the end of the tunnel. I knew I was going to play.”
THE RETURN, THE FUTURE
So meticulous was the McStay recovery plan that he didn’t truly feel nervous until he took the field for the first time, in a VFL match for Collingwood against Geelong.
This was 225 days after his knee gave way.
He explained: “(In your mind) you don’t know if your knee is going to hold up until you are in that position (of playing). That was probably a whirlwind of emotions going on inside, but on the outside I was trying to keep playing a straight bat.”
But the level of support from his senior teammates who came to watch him play, including Jeremy Howe who decked his son Zander out in a ‘DMac’ No.11 jumper, was something he hadn’t experienced before.
“I had literally the whole team there and they had just played Geelong the night before,” he recalled.
“I don’t think I have ever felt as loved as that moment probably ever in my footy career.”
"Man, it gets me." 🥹
— Collingwood FC (@CollingwoodFC) July 19, 2024
In a room full of our AFL and Collingwood AFLW athletes, an emotional Craig McRae announces the return of Dan McStay to our AFL Team 🖤🤠pic.twitter.com/80K62l44Xt
He kicked a goal early after taking a pack mark and got through the game so well that Magpies coach Craig McRae picked him to play the next week in the AFL against Hawthorn.
“It has meant so much to be back out there playing again,” he said. “I feel like I have learnt so much about myself.”
After 302-days away from the AFL, Dan McStay kicks his first goal since his devastating knee injury 🫶 pic.twitter.com/6ph1bJoBZb
— Collingwood FC (@CollingwoodFC) July 20, 2024
Never mind the fact that the Magpies lost heavily that day against the Hawks, or that he sprayed his first kick after a superb pass from Nick Daicos, McStay ended up with 1.2 in a positive display and he has backed that up by getting better and better each week.
While the Magpies are unlikely to play finals, he is buoyed by what this team still has to offer with clashes against his old side Brisbane and Melbourne.
But he’s confident the Magpies will be back in the premiership frame next year and that the medal he missed out on last September is something he will chase even harder in 2025.
“I feel like I really belong at Collingwood … We’ve got so much to look forward to.”
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