As a golf nut, Kade Stewart couldn’t have asked for a better setting in which to hear the most wonderful football news he could imagine.

“I was playing golf with Clarko (coach Alastair Clarkson) and Fages (football boss Chris Fagan),” Stewart recalls of a group that also included young forward James Sicily. “Then we just sat down afterwards, Clarko said, ‘Go to the forward line meeting, you’re playing this week.’

“I didn’t know what to say. That’s something you wish to hear for your whole life, a dream come true.”

Stewart’s golf and football make a pleasant contrast. He started swinging a club as a youngster back in Katanning, in Western Australia’s southern wheatbelt, but readily admits improvement came slowly. “I’ve had my times where I’d go for a hit every day or at least every second day, then other times where I wouldn’t go for about three months. It’s phases.”

His handicap has been stuck on 21 since he left behind Katanning’s bush fairways. His football, however, has moved at a speed to dizzy a 19-year-old’s head.

Stewart played a full season of colts footy with South Fremantle in 2014, a mix of underage, reserves and ultimately two senior WAFL games last year, but on rookie draft day in late November was as uncertain of a happy outcome as he might have been standing over a long putt on one of his home course’s sand greens.

Barely five months later, Clarkson welcomed him into the first 22 of the game’s modern-day powerhouse “No, not at all,” the 19-year-old says, head shaking, of the prospect that he might have foreseen a debut coming as early as round 11. “If you come in as a rookie you expect a full year – at least – in the VFL. It’s all come really quick. I’m so lucky to have had the opportunity to play for a team that’s won the premiership three times in a row.”

While there’s nothing extraordinary in a young footballer travelling a long road to the AFL, Stewart churned more kilometres than most. It’s an eight-hour round trip from Katanning to Perth, which he’d make up to three times a week with his primary school teacher Mum or electrician Dad at the wheel. Football sacrifice is a family affair; they’d knock off work at lunchtime, and the car wouldn’t roll back into the family driveway until almost midnight.

Not that he yearned to be somewhere else. Both sides of his family are Katanning people, and he likes the rural simplicity of his home of barely 5000 surrounded by farms that feed a large meatworks in the middle. Stewart’s grandfather is a semi-retired mechanic who “potters around the workshop” with his Uncle Todd. Older brother Tim followed their father into the sparky trade, and Kade is two years into his own electrician’s apprenticeship.

Historically Katanning was a place of two footy teams – Australs and Wanderers. Brenton Stewart played for Australs; his son has been told he was “a hard nut, a rough bloke who didn’t mind a bit of push and shove”. Local derbies accommodated the willing, drawing crowds and passion in that peculiar way of country places where football splits people who otherwise co-exist without fuss.

There’s only the Katanning Wanderers now, but Stewart has fond memories embedded through a childhood where the footy ground, golf course and swimming pool – hailed as the first in inland WA – were all a boy needed. Football became bigger in his world, and leaving school after Year 10 and moving to Perth was a penny-drop moment. “That’s when I switched myself on and thought, ‘I’ve got a really good chance here, make the most of it.’”

Against Melbourne on June 4 he made good that pledge, and in a tight last quarter had his own push-and-shove moment as several Demons set up on him after he missed what would have been his first AFL goal.

Stewart reflects that he didn’t expect his free for high contact – highlighted post-game by Clarkson as further evidence that players are endangering themselves in pursuit of free kicks – to “splash out over the media like it did”. He’d hate to be known as a “ducker”, has reviewed the incident in depth, but at the time was simply miffed that he missed the goal.

“I definitely should have kicked it, but things happen, nerves kicked in,” he says, breathing a little easier over the chance five minutes later that gave his team breathing space. “I got one in the end, Lukey Breust gave me one, set it up nicely. I was lucky just to sneak it in, I was watching it all the way.”

Katanning has already produced a Hawthorn premiership player – two-time leading goalkicker Mark Williams. Stewart’s goals aren’t yet so lofty; he wants only to play “consistent, strong footy” along a relatively flat line that has only peaks, not troughs.
“You’ve got to take it in a good manner, can’t get ahead of yourself,” he says of his unexpectedly rapid rise. “Do everything right. Be who you were that got you to that spot. Hopefully it just keeps on rolling.”