FIGHTING for a contract following her pregnancy journey changed Kate Darby's career – and the AFLW – forever.

Prior to Darby falling pregnant in late 2020, the only players who had taken a year out of the game due to pregnancy were pioneer Daisy Pearce, and star cricketer-turned-footballer Jess Duffin. When Pearce and Duffin announced their pregnancies, there was a general consensus that there would be a place for them at their respective clubs on return.

For Darby it was a little different. Already fighting for selection, on the fringes of Geelong's best 21, there wasn't that assumption that there would be a contract on the other end. Trickier still was that it all happened while the footy world was navigating the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Family planning, now I've learned, is stressful for anyone in any situation," Darby said on The Inaugurals.

"I remember being on the track in a training session and all of a sudden, the coaches come out and they were like 'The season's done' … so, (I) remember coming off the field on the training track that day and (I was) like 'Do I want to play next year?' I had just hung onto a contract every season, like I'm hanging on the edge here.

"I was pretty in and out of the side, in and out of the selected squad so I probably was like 'Oh well, if the season's done, then I'm possibly done'."

With the fate of her footy career out of her control – and the AFLW prematurely shut down with uncertainty swirling – Darby and partner Daniel decided to launch into another uncontrollable, starting a family.

"I don't have control over whether or not (I'm) going to get a contract, and really, you only have so much control as to whether you can get pregnant and how fast that happens for you … and so I was like 'Well, let's try for both and we'll see what happens'," Darby said.

"And so, we obviously got pregnant, and at this point I hadn't really heard from the club as to what was going to happen. We'd spoken, and they always check up on our wellbeing, but I didn't know what the next season looked like for me."

Two days before her eight-week scan, Darby received a phone call from the club's list manager Ben Waller to offer a contract for 2021.

"At this point in my head I was like 'Well I'm pregnant, so I'm going to have to retire' … because I was like 'I would love to play again, but I'm just scraping a contract when I'm completely healthy, let alone when I've just pushed out a human'," Darby said.

When the contract offer came, she was honest with Waller, but it didn't result in him rescinding the deal, and so Darby was on the list with both parties aware that the likelihood of her playing was slim to none.

The following year, however, things looked a little different. Darby had three-week old Ella to care for, and a messy sleep schedule. The club tried to offer her space in such a tricky time, but it meant exit meetings passed her by.

She reached out, requesting the chat because she was determined to continue her footy career post-baby, and was armed with a list of reasons why she deserved another chance.

"I was still in the space of 'I really still want to play, I have more to give to this game, I don't feel like I've gotten out what I can give', so I am up at night with Ella, yes, but I'm also up at night in my head being like, 'This is why I should play again'," Darby said.

"I ended up getting my phone out because I just couldn't sleep … I put in my notes section all of the reasons why Geelong needed to sign me again, and I took that into my exit meeting."

Unfortunately, they'd already made the call, and there wasn't a spot for Darby going forward. But she didn't take it lying down, another meeting was organised for her to plead her case to Waller and Geelong's then-head of AFLW Brett Johnson.

There was still no spot on the list, but she made an impact.

"Post that meeting I remember 'BJ', so Brett Johnson, called me and was like 'This doesn't sit well with me at all … you're not getting this chance just because you've had a family', so he reached out to (then-AFL general manager of women's football) Nicole Livingstone and was like 'The AFL needs to support people coming back in a better way that what they do'," Darby said.

"So, that year they created a contract that didn't exist that allowed me to be pretty much a paid train-on player."

Darby was back at the club and, ultimately, made her way back onto the list as a replacement signing for good friend Renee Garing, who would be sitting out 2022 (S6) while pregnant.

But that fight made it possible for all players to have some security while balancing family planning with their footy career.

"I was so passionate about it obviously, selfishly, I was like 'I want to play again, I feel like I can do this, I feel like I can add to the team', but also Daisy had done it but, I mean, she would have had a contract because she's Daisy Pearce. And Jess (Duffin), you know, high name, high class players," Darby explained.

"But I was like, I want to show that someone who's literally scraping into contracts when I was fit and healthy can still come back and still perform after pregnancy."

A strong campaign across 2022 (S6) as a replacement signing propelled Darby back to the primary list for the next season later that year, kickstarting her time as a player selected in the team each week.

Prior to her pregnancy, Darby had played 12 of a possible 21 games, but since returning she has consistently been in the side, with 42 of a possible 45 appearances.

With the platform she has earned as an AFLW player, first with Carlton in 2017, and since 2019 with the Cats, she has worked to do some good off the field. Darby is an ambassador for the Peace of Mind Foundation, a children's brain cancer charity, which has seen her earn four Geelong community champion awards.

Playing for the Blues in that first year, Darby went along to a children's hospital on a community visit, and met a young patient named Sienna in the process.

"(2017), it was pretty up and down, so I was probably feeling like – and it's silly to look back on it – feeling like I was pretty hard done by, and then you're in this children's hospital and you're like 'How dare you think that you're hard done by'," Darby said.

"There was this one girl, Sienna, who I met, and she was mad, mad Blues and I'm very thankful because she didn't let any other teams in to see her. She only let us in, her dad's a Melbourne fan, she'd turned the Melbourne boys away at the door and her dad was spewing.

"She let us talk to her … we weren't allowed to go into the room because she was susceptible to germs and stuff like that, so we had to stand at her door. But anyway, we gave her posters and whatnot, and we were just talking to her."

Sienna had beaded necklaces hanging in her room with each bead representing a procedure she had undertaken. It was learning this that hit Darby the hardest.

"I reckon she was like seven or eight at the time, and she was the happiest kid, she knew footy, she really knew her footy. And I'm like this kid has gone through hell and back … I actually remembered I had my own footy – Carlton gave us all our own footballs – and I had mine in my bag and I was like 'I know I can't come into your room, but if I give your mum my footy, can you sign it?'" Darby recalled.

That signature on Darby's footy was a reminder of strength and resilience, and also a catalyst to becoming a charity ambassador. And Sienna? She's in high school, playing sport, and being a normal teenager.

Meeting Sienna, and having Ella, has given Darby a different perspective on her footy journey. There have been struggles, but at the end of the day, it's just a game.

"The opportunity that was, and is at the end of the day, a game, and no matter if I played my ass off or did nothing, I'd come home and because I still (breast) fed the whole first season, I'm coming home and I'm still up at two in the morning with this tiny little thing that was my world," Darby said.

"And she's thinking I'm the best thing in her world, and she doesn't care if I got any kicks, or whether I kicked five goals. (She) just saw me as the best thing ever and it just was so grounding, and it just made that season so much easier to enjoy for what it was."