If you ask anyone who’s ruptured their ACL, they’ll tell you it’s one of the hardest things to go through.

But if you ask Ainslie Kemp, she would say that the first time isn’t so bad, if there is such a thing.

That’s because Kemp has ruptured her ACL three times, all in the space of three years.

After initially finding her love of the game as a nine-year-old filling in for her local team, the defender eventually made her way onto Melbourne’s inaugural AFLW list after years of hard work and sacrifice. Little did she know that this hard work and sacrifice would only be the beginning as she would soon be struck down by her first knee injury. 

While the news was obviously shattering, Kemp being the optimistic person that she is saw her first bout of rehabilitation as an opportunity.

“Going through juniors and VWFL, I didn’t have to be super disciplined, I sort of just got through on my talent,” Kemp admitted.

“This was the first time that I had time to get fitter and understand my body a bit more. Obviously, it was devastating at the time but I had to shift my mindset to what I could get out of this injury. Melbourne was really supportive of that too. They wanted me to work on the parts of my game that I couldn’t in such a condensed pre-season and home-and-away season.”

After working her way back to the field, Kemp went down with the same injury to the same knee again in the 2019 VFLW season. This time around, it was a “stab in the guts”.

“I had put in all this hard work, been super disciplined and learned so much about myself and it didn’t pay off,” Kemp reflected.

“It just left a bad taste in my mouth because I couldn’t prove I was a good player and I couldn’t really get consistency. Contractually, I knew I was missing out on another season and I was worried about being delisted.”

This time, Kemp and the Dees elected to go down the non-operative route as she admitted that ACL surgery can be “a bit traumatic”. Amazingly, this led to her playing without an anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee when she made another attempt to return to AFLW.

This attempt would be the one that would cause the most heartbreak.

In a Friday night bout against the Western Bulldogs in 2020, Kemp would succumb to her third ACL injury - this time to her ‘good’ left knee. It forced her to go to extreme measures to keep her physical and mental health in good shape.

“When the third one (ACL injury) hit, I didn’t even really want a contract at that stage, I just needed time away to really reassess why it kept happening,” Kemp said.

“It was financially burdening as well because I couldn’t work and my results at uni suffered because I was working pretty hard in rehab. I just had to sit and reflect on how I could really turn my life around instead of focusing on footy because I had a bit of a reality check that footy won’t be around forever. I needed to get all my ducks in order for my life and how that’s going to progress. I stepped away from the game, I unfollowed every single football team and the league on social media and I deleted all the apps - I just had to go M.I.A for a while.”

Following the cancellation of the 2020 AFLW season, Kemp was delisted by Melbourne.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom though, as she found her way back into the game through Hawthorn’s VFLW program.

After initially joining the team as a runner in 2021, Kemp returned to the field in 2022 and was immediately elevated to the leadership group. Despite her goal being to just simply get back out onto the field, she soon learned that the Hawks would help reignite her passion for the game.

“It was pretty hard not to love the game again when you’re around a group and a club like Hawthorn VFLW,” Kemp said.

“Everyone was just so lovely, the coaches were amazing and they just accepted everyone for who they were and where they were in life. They expanded their culture to fit you in it rather than you fitting into a specific cultural mould.”

Kemp’s form in the VFLW caught the eye of AFLW Senior Coach Bec Goddard, who presented the classy defender with a second chance at the elite level, this time in the brown and gold. It was AFLW List Manager Mitch Cashion who delivered the news to a teary Kemp, who was fortunate to be in a room with her nearest and dearest by chance.

“I was at work when I got the call from Mitch and it was really fitting because the people in the room when I got the call were the people who helped me the most over the past years that I wasn’t really part of the game,” she said.

However, the one person that wasn’t in her room was perhaps her biggest supporter, her Mum.

“My Mum’s been my biggest fan and my biggest critic throughout my whole footy career and I’m pretty sure she lives vicariously through me,” Kemp said.

"She probably wouldn’t like the fact that she wasn’t the first person to find out but she’s absolutely the first person in my mind and the first person to call. There’s been so much support and everyone’s ridden the wave with me over these past few years.”

Despite going through several gruelling rounds of rehabilitation over the years, strength and conditioning is the career path Kemp has gone down at a facility in the Melbourne suburb of Kensington called Motus Life. She also investigated why these knee injuries are so common, especially in her case, by completing a Graduate Certificate in Exercise Rehabilitation for Sports Injuries. Even though the content was often confronting and her work in strength and conditioning took a toll on her at times, Kemp never lost sight of her main goal - to ensure others never have to go through what she did. 

“I think me studying a Grad Cert was me asking: why do injuries happen? I don’t want anyone else to go through this, it’s painful in more ways than one and I don’t want people to experience this,” the 25-year-old said.

“As an athlete, we don’t often get the whole picture when it comes to strength and conditioning so for me, working in the industry, it’s cool to see how much effort those people put in behind the scenes.”

And let’s face it, without those people in her corner we might not have seen Kemp pick up a footy at the elite level again.

Now, she will make her debut for the Hawthorn Football Club.

That little girl filling in with the boys would be proud.