AFL side Hawthorn Football Club still holds a high-impact returning talent in promising young gun Will Day, but club leaders have made clear they will not cut corners on his recovery to rush him back to the top-tier lineup before he is fully ready. After a frustrating two-and-a-half years marked by repeated injury setbacks, Day is on track to make his comeback through the Victorian Football League (VFL) on restricted minutes, before earning a call-up to the senior AFL side.
Day’s career has been plagued by bad luck with injuries over recent seasons: the young talent has featured in just six senior AFL matches across the last two campaigns. His most recent setback, a shoulder injury sustained during pre-season training, has forced him to sit out the entirety of Hawthorn’s strong start to the 2024 season, where the club has notched four wins from its opening five matches. However, the club confirmed Day turned in an impressive, fully cleared training session on Thursday, and is projected to be available for senior selection within a five-week window.
Hawthorn head coach Sam Mitchell told reporters he is encouraged by Day’s steady recovery progress, but remains firm on sticking to a slow, conservative rehabilitation plan to avoid re-injury. “I think he’ll come back through the VFL. I think he’ll play reasonably limited game time in his first game back whenever that is, I couldn’t put an exact date on it,” Mitchell explained. “When he gets back, I suspect he will play at least one game with limited game time through the VFL and we’ll make assessments from there. He’s still a period away, even though, I must admit I watch him train and am thinking, ‘Are you sure it has to be that long?’ But you just trust the medical staff, they do a great job for us. I am looking forward to getting him back but it won’t be soon.”
During Thursday’s training session, Day completed controlled light tackling drills as his teammates prepared for this weekend’s match against Port Adelaide at Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium. When asked whether the club would ask Day to adjust his playing technique to reduce future injury risk, Mitchell pushed back on that idea, noting that the majority of Day’s past injuries have not been contact-related, and the current tackling drills are only part of gradual contact conditioning, not a technical overhaul.
“The majority of his injuries haven’t been impact, he’s obviously had the stuff with his feet which have been the majority of his stuff,” Mitchell said. “He’s only had the two physical hit injuries, one was from Jai Newcombe of all people, and then the one at training. So technique wise he’s quite good. I think as they build back the training, you obviously build them back physically with running, weights, but you also have to build back contact. They’ll build back his contact tolerance, he’ll do controlled tackling because the worst thing you can do is no tackling and then ‘OK, play footy.’ It’s not that we’re changing his technique too much, it’s just that we’re slowly getting him used to contact before he comes back.”