Sophie McDonald is a force to be reckoned with. In the event she isn’t on your radar, Sophie is an AFLW footballer who plays for the West Coast Eagles as a defender. She’s had quite the career path, pivoting to AFLW from hockey, where she played state-level hockey as a junior (casually).
Sophie has become an accidental advocate for mental health and burnout prevention in sport. Back in 2022, two months out from the AFLW season kicking off, she realised that she was no longer enjoying the sport she loved. In an interview with Missing Perspectives, Sophie speaks candidly about what happened – and her inclination to give up AFLW entirely – and how her club supported her throughout the process.
You kicked off your sporting career playing hockey – how did you pivot to AFL, and what did you love most about the sport?
It all properly started in 2018. I actually did a bit of Auskick when I was in Years 1 and 2 [at primary school], but decided to play hockey the next year, following my parents footsteps. I really was just sports mad as a kid and many recesses and lunches were spent on the oval playing a variety of sports, so footy was never really a mystery to me but was never an option to pursue professionally.
Naturally, my childhood dream was to play hockey for Australia at the Olympics.
Things started to change when the first season of AFLW came around. I vividly remember watching the first ever match being played and sitting on the couch with my mum and thinking to myself, “Oh I could do this.” The problem for me, was that there was no female footy in my hometown of Albany, but things were starting to change. In 2017, they put together a range of different female footy games to bring eyes to what it could be for the town. The next year, the inaugural female footy league started.
I had a heap of fun. I really loved the physicality of the game and the welcoming community that surrounded it, but it still never really crossed my mind that I’d take it seriously. At that time, It was just a fun game to play with friends and get me fit to play hockey over the winter.
There was a bit of a break for a couple of months whilst I dived into hockey that winter, but just as the season finished, something caught my mum’s eye. The West Coast Eagles had put up a call for “elite” cross-code athletes to do a come-and-try day at Subiaco Oval. Looking back, this is really the decision that kick-started a chain of events leading to me getting drafted the next year. The day was structured a bit like a draft combine with various physical tests as well as football skill tests. Whilst is was quite cool to experience the testing side of footy, it was amazing to meet heaps of athletes from a range of different sports. I went back to Albany the day after thinking that it was a cool experience but never really thinking anything would eventuate from it.
A week later, mum gets a call from Adam Selwood. He liked what he saw from me that day and wanted to meet up again in Perth. So, mum and I went up to Perth and met with him and Jan Cooper. It was there they invited me to train with their female academy in the next year, as well as joining the under 18 state program and playing WAFLW as a way of maybe being drafted by them in a couple of years. I was already planning on moving up to Perth the next year anyway as I was offered opportunities for hockey as well. So, the decision was very easy for me, I’ll play both footy and hockey in 2019.
When did you decide to pursue AFL full time?
I don’t think I ever truly made the decision for myself, it just kind of panned out that way. In 2019, I moved to Perth to pursue both hockey and footy, coming in with the mindset of, “whichever one pans out best at the end of the season, that’s the one I’ll stick with.” This meant that I was juggling at least 6 training sessions and 2 games a week, sometimes playing 2 games in one day. Looking back, it was a mildly insane thing for me to do, but I was very lucky that my footy and hockey clubs were incredibly supportive of the other sports and I was able to balance it out pretty well.
Around August that year, I received a call. It was Adam Selwood and Luke Dwyer (then coach of the AFLW team) offering me a place in the inaugural AFLW squad for the next season. This caught me completely by surprise. I was under the impression that it would take a few years and maybe I’d be drafted, but to have it offered to me only 8 months after moving to Perth, I couldn’t say no. And as they say, the rest is history and I haven’t looked back since.
Can you share a little about your experience of burnout – what you think caused it, and how you got through it? Or is it an ongoing presence that you have to manage?
It could be very easy for me to say that the burnout that I experienced in 2022 would be the first time I had experienced mental health struggles, but it’s probably something that’s been popping in and out of my life for over a decade and it’s only just these last couple of years that I’ve been able to recognise it for what it was. But back to 2022.
It was the first AFLW season that year and I had gone through a month-long hub, 2-week quarantine and concussion. But somehow, I was actually feeling pretty good. But I think the start of my spiral came the day after the season ended.
We had played North Melbourne the day prior and had flown back that same day, standard away trip. Not long after I woke up the next morning, my dad called me. My pop had passed away after a long fight with cancer. Now this was something that had been coming for a while, he was diagnosed a couple of years before, but you are never prepared for when the day comes, or when grief manifests itself. From what I can remember I wasn’t really feeling any strong emotions at the time, so I was thinking that I was doing ok.
From then on, I threw myself into work and footy, as it was announced that a second season would commence in a few months time. In that time, I started to feel more and more fatigued, started sleeping badly and my mindset started to become more negative. There was also quite a lot of change happening at the club and I started to place unreal expectations and standards on myself regarding the upcoming season. This internal pressure and struggle kept mounting and building until one day it became too much.
Picture this, it was a week out from preseason starting, I had just started a running session and halfway through the first lap a thought popped into my head, “This isn’t fun anymore.”
Now I’ve had thoughts similar to this before around a drill that I’m doing at training, or a meeting that I’m in, but it was the first time that that thought had applied to sport as a whole. And honestly, it was one of the scariest things that had happened to me. Something that had been such a large part of my life and something that I had loved entirely for so long was now not feeling like it should.
Safe to say, I completely broke down. It was like a limb had been cut off from my body and I didn’t know what to do.
I was in such a hysterical state that I had called my mum and was talking about maybe not continuing playing AFLW. At that time, I didn’t really know what to do but all I wanted was to go back home to Albany and get away from it all. So, I got in contact with the club and notified them that I was going back to my family for a bit for mental health reasons.
From there, I was back home, not thinking about football, helping dad out on the farm and started having regular sessions with the club’s sport psychologist to help me work through what I was feeling and what I can do to mitigate the noise in my head and recognise the signs before it becomes too late. It took some time, but I was able to gradually integrate myself back into the program and from there have a really strong season for the club.
Honestly, I don’t think that you ever truly “get over it”, per se, but over the years you learn more and more techniques and strategies to help whenever you do start feeling yourself start to slip. I think of mental health as a very fluid thing, you always ebb and flow between good and bad days, and if it’s good, that’s great, really relish in that good feeling. If it’s bad, that’s ok too, just find the little things that have happened that day that were good and you find that the next days get easier and easier.
How did your club support you during this time?
The club was a huge support for me during this time. There was a bit of wariness on my side as I was in such a negative mental state that I’d immediately catastrophise whatever situation that I was in and had convinced myself that they wouldn’t let me go home. But I should never have worried as they put my mental health first over me as a player. As I mentioned before they then got me in contact with Jodii, who had just signed as the club’s sport psych.
I have told Jodi this many times, but if it wasn’t for her, I definitely wouldn’t be playing AFLW today. Before our first session together, I was a bit hesitant as I had previously had a bad experience with a psychologist as a 12 year old, but straight away, she put those worries to bed. We talked, we laughed, we cried and we came up with different techniques for me to get myself feeling good as well as dedicating more time to the person I was outside of footy. Hands down she was my favourite person of 2022.
In the time since I took that mental health break, the club have been amazing for me. I have no qualms in contacting them at any point during the year and saying that I need a bit of time away because I know that they have their full support behind me and they want what’s best for me, both on and off the field.
It’s such an exciting time for women’s sports – what are you most looking forward to in this upcoming AFLW season? And what progress do you think still needs to be made?
One of the more obvious ones is seeing the new talent come through. These are girls that have played footy throughout their childhood and school years and it absolutely shows with their skills and smarts. It pushes the rest of us to keep improving and raises the level of the competition every year.
Another is seeing what this group can do this year. Safe to say, we haven’t performed to our liking since we’ve entered the competition, but it feels like there’s something really exciting brewing and I can’t wait to see how it manifests itself this season. We’re now going into every game thinking that we can win and that our best is just as good, if not better than everyone else’s.
In a slightly nerdy sense, I’m pretty excited to see how the new ball technology will go. It feels like the right direction to go seeing as most grounds that we play on don’t facilitate ARC technology. From what I’ve heard it’s been pretty successful in the VFL hopefully it will translate well for us too.
In terms of progress, the obvious one for us is to have a longer season, ideally playing every team once, and then going to finals. I understand there’s a lot of different logistics that I’m naively skipping but I think in terms of fairness of the competition, it makes the most sense to me.