Lucy Waye was going on 12 and in Year Six at a suburban Adelaide primary school when she first picked up a football. 

It was 2019 and having grown up playing basketball, she decided to try out for her school’s football SAPSASA team. 

She got in.

“And I loved it,” Waye said of playing in the carnival.

“I got in the car and just said: ‘Dad, you have got to sign me up for football right now’. 

“I fell in love with the sport that day.”

Not long afterwards she was playing for the Goodwood Saints in their junior teams, juggling school and basketball commitments before a stress fracture in her foot sidelined her for much of 2021. 

After nine months recovering in a moon boot, Waye turned her focus away from the round ball to the Sherrin and in 2022 she was in West Adelaide’s junior program and her star seemed to be on the rise.

But when the Under-16s state championships came around in 2023, Waye was told she wasn’t going to get a game.

“That was soul-crushing,” she said.

“It was probably my first-ever setback.

“Then the next year - the beginning of 2024, I didn’t get invited to the Under-18s trials in my bottom age, and that was hard.”

It was at this point that Waye realised she needed to turn her own disappointments into fuel to stoke her footy fire.

“I went away after that season and thought to myself: ‘This is my chance, it’s now or never’,” she said.

“So, I put in a lot of work, did a lot of personal training, running, skills over the off-season and came back to Westies and that was when everything lifted off and I found that my actions could speak louder than my words ever could.

“It was also a mental thing, I knew that if I wanted to play AFLW, then I was going to have to work really hard.”

With all that hard work came confidence. And with the confidence, came an improved game presence for Westies. 

And no one was surprised when she made the Under-18s South Australian team and headed to the 2025 national carnival as a mid-forward.

“I finally got my games (in the SA jumper),” she said. 

“I was so nervous … I had no clue what to expect.”

Waye might have been nervous, but she shone on the ground, picking up 23 touches (including 10 contested possessions), had four clearances, two rebound-50s and took four marks. 

“I was rapt.”

And so were recruiters who began to watch the 169cm forward closely. 

Still, she kept working and when she attended the 2025 AFLW Draft Combine, her athleticism placed her in the Top 10 nation-wide in four testing categories including the 20m sprint and running vertical leap. 

But despite all the draft talk that swirled around her, it was her love of the game that she kept coming back to. 

“It was like I didn’t have to work that hard because I loved it so much,” she said.

“Everyone was always saying to me: ‘Why are you always at the gym? Why are you always running?’ And I was like: ‘I don’t see it as work. I see it as my passion.

“And I think because I’d been overlooked in the past, there was a part of me that just wanted to prove everyone wrong; that was my mental switch.”

Fast forward, then, to Monday, December 15, 2025: Draft Day. But not only was it Draft Day, it was the day Waye’s Year 12 results came out. 

The first celebration that day was had when her ATAR results came back in the 90s – well and truly enough to get her into her preferred university course in Biological and Medicinal Chemistry.

But nerves remained high as the clock ticked down to the Draft. 

However, the 18-year-old’s worries were left behind the moment she heard her name called out at Pick No.21 and it dawned on Waye that she’d be joining the club she grew up supporting.

“I bawled my eyes out when I was drafted – I thought I wouldn’t cry, I thought I’d be fine,” she said. 

“My mum decided to invite every single person she could possibly know on the planet, so we barely had any room at our house and everyone was so squished in. 

“It was a very emotional day.”

In the moments after she was drafted, the surprises kept coming when Crows Co-Captains Sarah Allan and Ebony Marinoff and assistant coach Courtney Cramey knocked on her front door to join in the celebrations.

Waye hasn’t stopped pinching herself since.

“It’s unreal…sometimes it still hasn’t hit me yet that I’ve been drafted,” she said.

“I’ll be driving home after spending a few hours at the club and I’m like: ‘This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.

“I love it so much and words cannot describe how grateful I am.”