MAX HALL heads here as soon as he can after every game.

Surrounded by 10,000 acres of space in Yea, the emerging St Kilda star can unwind, reset and get to work on his cows. There are hundreds of them; none of them care if he got a kick or not.

The cattle farm has always been his refuge. His grandparents have lived in this part of Victoria's High Country for almost half a century. Hall came here every school holidays, every weekend around footy.

That hasn't stopped since he was plucked from the VFL in the 2024 Mid-Season Rookie Draft. In fact, now more than ever before, time out in the paddock helps him keep his feet firmly grounded.

Under Ross Lyon's watch, the Saints give their players a day or two off after every game, depending on how long the break is. Hall only heads one way: straight to Yea. Which is where he spent part of the mid-season break.

Last month, the 24-year-old walked AFL.com.au around the Hall family farm, 90 minutes north-east of Melbourne, to discuss his meteoric rise from obscurity to one of the highest rated mid-forwards in the AFL. More on that later.

"I go up straight after the game, usually stay the night and spend a day and a bit up here. I just I find it helps me reset and forget about the week just gone, whether it's been good or bad, and get into the week coming," Hall tells AFL.com.au while trimming his cows.

"I love hanging out on the farm, but I feel like when I come back for footy, I'm just reset. It just keeps me level, whether some weeks are good, some weeks are bad in footy.

"I get up here and just forget about everything for a day or so and come back down and just - I don't know - I just level and it keeps me ready to go for the coming week."

Everyone needs a circuit-breaker in this caper. The farm has always been that outlet for Hall.

"My nan and my grandpa have been here for 46 years. I don't know what it is about it, but as soon as I was born, I just had a love for it. I was always out in the tractor or the ute with my grandpa doing all sorts of things. I didn't get drafted in my draft year, so I would that have spent three or four years full time working on the farm with my grandpa and just loved it," he says.

Hall is the latest name on a growing list of hits plucked out of the Mid-Season Rookie Draft. Jai Newcombe, obviously, is the poster boy of what's possible from obscurity. Marlion Pickett has the premierships on his CV. John Noble, Massimo D'Ambrosio, Daniel Turner and Sam Durham have all become guns. But when this chapter of his life is over, Hall will trade in his current bayside life for quiet time on the farm.

"Big time. I've got a big passion in farming, particularly cattle," he says. "I think post footy for sure I'll do something down that path. I run about 100 cows myself now. So the goal while I'm in footy is to expand that to somewhere where post footy, it's viable to live off."

Hall's grandpa Les helped pave the way from part-time state league player to full-time footballer in the first place. Always encouraging, always pushing. Max worked for four years on the farm once he finished school, where he gradually improved at Box Hill, following traumatic injury setbacks as a teenager.

"Grandpa really helped me through the whole getting drafted stage," Hall says while preparing to spray the cows with a topical anti-bacterial treatment. 

"I obviously worked for him for four years full-time, and it was basically he who told me footy's number one. So whenever I needed to go for anything football related or whatever it was, he just (said) 'go, go, go'. He was really supportive with that. Along with Dad, they're probably the two biggest male figures I've had."

Dad is Brad Hall. He was drafted to Melbourne out of Assumption College at the age of 17 in 1993. Jim Stynes had just been named All-Australian for a second time and had already won his Brownlow Medal by then, so getting a game in the ruck ahead of the Irishman who didn’t miss proved impossible. Brad was delisted after two years without a game to his name, but with a life experience that resonated with his son decades later.

"I think Jim Stynes never gave him a look in. He toiled away there for a couple of years and then he got delisted. But he's probably been one of the biggest in my journey in terms of I think he probably wishes he went about it a little bit differently in terms of his work ethic and that," Hall says in the back paddock.

"He said to me, 'If you're going to do it, do it right. And later on in life, you don't want to question whether you could have done it a bit differently or gone a bit harder'. I think that's a lesson that he's been able to teach me that has helped me big time."

Unlike his dad, Hall took the long route to the AFL. Two knee reconstructions were part of the reason why. The first time he snapped his lateral collateral ligament. He was only 16 and had complications. Then COVID happened when he got a shot at the Eastern Ranges.

"They said the surgery (I had), I was one of the youngest they've seen to do it. I did the whole rehab (for) 11 months, got the all clear, literally got the tick off from the doctor, went to training from there and the first five minutes, I basically did it again. So I spent another 10 months out of footy," he says.

"I probably lost a lot of love for footy (during that period). I didn't really care too much for it. Then once I got my body right again, I just went back to playing footy with my mates at juniors and we ended up winning the flag. Then I got contacted to come down to the Eastern Ranges and then got hit again with back-to-back Covid years."

Hall could have been one of the thousands of should-have-made-it cases that never did. We all know someone. He went back to Montrose in Melbourne's outer east and played with his mates in the under-19s. But after playing seniors in the Eastern Football League across the first half of 2022, he got a shot in the VFL. 

And took it. He spent almost all of 2023 playing for Box Hill, but then Zane Littlejohn, the highly rated state league coach now at North Melbourne, dropped him for the preliminary final that year after playing 15 games. That decision was a fork in the road. Suburban clubs were offering envelopes stacked full of cash and big sign-on numbers. Hall was tempted, but didn't want to wonder 'what if' down the track. 

"Definitely (that was a defining moment). I think it was probably the biggest turning moment getting drafted because it could have gone two ways. And I was originally on the fence. I wasn't sure whether I was going to go on again. It was like, 'I might go back and play local footy with my mates'," Hall says.

"I had a discussion with a few important people in my life: my partner Ruby and then my family as well around if you go back and give it one more crack.

"Similar to what Dad told me with his AFL story ... if you just give it one more crack and give it everything, at least you can hang your hat up knowing that you gave it everything. I think that's what I did. I didn't leave any stone unturned."

St Kilda was the first club that met with him - not just in 2024, but ever. Saints recruiting boss Simon Dalrymple organised a chat in April to find out more. A few other clubs spoke to him over Zoom. Hawthorn knew what they had under their noses, but didn't need another half-forward. The Saints landed him at pick No.4 that May, but Hall didn't burst out the blocks.

And there was a reason why. Just before the Mid-Season Rookie Draft, Hall hurt his back on the farm. Which is why he was a late scratching before what would have been his final game for Box Hill. More than a handful of recruiters had come to watch him at Box Hill City Oval, but he wasn't playing.

"I was a bit nervous there for a week or so just before the draft," he says while walking through a paddock.

"I was on the farm working and I just bent over to pick up a piece of wood and I felt my back go pop. I had a bit of a slipped disc there for maybe a month or so. I couldn't play those last couple games at Box Hill. But once I got here, the rehab crew got me on a good program and I was back a lot quicker than what was first anticipated. That's how the back happened."

Hall battled through a month at Sandringham after arriving at RSEA Park, but the back was still causing him grief. He played two more games but wasn't close to getting picked. The coach made it clear to him in his exit interview that he needed to do more work on his body. Head of development and learning Damian Carroll and welfare manager Tony Brown also made that clear when they met with Hall and his manager Mark Kleiman, from Kapital Sports, that off-season. It was make or break.

"Yeah that was important. It was just around the importance of like taking control of your career. When I first got here, I had the back stuff and I probably didn't use that time as well as I could to fast track myself," he says.

"I probably wasn't physically in the right spot to be playing, just in terms of my work ethic. I don't think it was intentional; I hadn't been at an elite environment before and probably wasn't aware of the elite standards that you needed.

"I've always found myself a hard trainer and I was always training hard, but it was probably the little things around diet and recovery that I probably wasn't getting right. The conversation was around some players don't last forever at AFL level; you can be spat out and gone pretty quickly. So (I thought) 'you've got this off-season to really make it, really make a stamp for yourself and get yourself fit and ready'. 

"I went away that off-season and just made sure I came into the club every day with boys that were training and trained as hard as I could, got myself and my body in a position where I could attack the year. I was lucky enough to debut in round one and it's sort of gone pretty well for me since then."

Hall's numbers since making his debut in the first round of 2025 leap off the page. In that time, he is the No.7 rated mid-forward in the League behind only Touk Miller, Chad Warner, Brent Daniels, Izak Rankine, Errol Gulden and Zac Bailey. This year, he is rated No.4 in that role and No.6 for total score involvements. It's why he is in the hunt for a spot in the All-Australian squad. 

After joining the Saints on an 18-month contract, Hall landed a two-year extension this time last year and is in line for a big pay rise in his next deal, with movement on a long-term extension expected in the coming weeks.

Unlike most players, the farmer from Melbourne's outer east knows what life after footy looks like. He isn’t caught up in his meteoric rise like the rest of us. Returning to the farm weekly is the reminder he needs that footy isn’t everything.