IT'S very rare that a broken arm will act as the spark for an AFL career.

But for Geelong star Max Holmes, that one brutal injury changed everything.

Melbourne Grammar's Year 12 football coach Mitch Cowan can still vividly remember the sound of the break. "He just looked down and his arm was in half," he tells AFL.com.au. It had happened when Holmes was just 16, attempting a 'don't argue' on a Wesley College opponent, and it ruined his entire season.

But Holmes never let the injury deflate him. Instead, he did everything you can do when recovering from such a horrific blow. He hit the gym and worked on the parts of his body that weren't injured. "He just transformed himself into the powerful leg athlete that he is now," Cowan says.

Indeed, a year later, Holmes' body was unrecognisable. A photo of the talented youngster, still undrafted at the time, next to St Kilda champion Lenny Hayes is proof of that. "I'll always remember that photo because he's got the biggest quads in it," his agent, Tom Seccull from Hemisphere Management Group, says. "His quads are honestly bigger than Lenny's."

Holmes' dedication to refining the lower half of his body improved what was already his biggest strength, that being his elite power and athletic profile. It's also what has culminated in the Geelong star's first standout season in 2024, where he has emerged as one of the League's most damaging breakaway midfielders.

Having started his Cats career with roles using his gut-running ability on the wing and his line-breaking speed across half-back, Holmes flourishing into an evasive and destructive clearance player hasn't been a surprise to his former coaches at Melbourne Grammar. In fact, they had been building gameplans around his physical strengths since his first days at the school.

"We would put him at full-forward and let him lead up at the footy," Cowan says. "But we would kick it over his head and let him beat blokes back to it once he'd turned them around. He'd kick five or six goals a game doing that, just dominating. Whenever there was grass in front of him, he mowed it down. It was just awesome to watch."

Such were Holmes' talents in various athletics meets, there came a point where he had been tossing up a career on the track and weighed up the prospect of potentially competing collegiately in the United States. Like his rising stardom on the footy field, there is every chance Holmes could have enjoyed similar success overseas.

"His main event was the 400m hurdles, then he would complement that with the 400m flat and a bit of the 110m hurdles. But the 400m hurdles was where he had his best results," Melbourne Grammar's head of athletic development, Dan Martin, tells AFL.com.au.

"I've got no doubt he could've been equally as good on the track as he is on the footy field, and he's obviously going exceptionally well there. But with the rate of his improvement through into Year 12, he would've been in the mix for Australian under-20s teams. After that, the world is your oyster."

Perhaps Holmes' athletic talents are born from genetics. His mother, Lee Naylor, competed in 400m track events at both the 1996 and the 2000 Olympics and was a gold medallist at the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Australia's 4x400m relay team. But pinning it solely on his family roots would understate his work ethic.

Like he did when he broke his arm as a 16-year-old, Holmes has continually worked to improve himself ever since arriving at Geelong. That type of dedication made him a damaging half-back, then a tireless winger, and has now helped turn him into being a midfielder capable of making the extended All-Australian squad, as he did for the first time earlier this year.

"He's so internally driven," Cowan says.

"He will work away from the group. He's a head down, bum up sort of kid that will just do anything to get an advantage. He's just got bigger and bigger and when he debuted, he didn't look out of place at all. You could just see that he was going to make his mark on the wing and across the half-back flank. I didn't see him moving into the midfield as quickly as he's done, but he's always been a classy footballer."

Holmes' mixture of power, speed and endurance through the midfield famously led to Geelong captain Patrick Dangerfield comparing him to West Coast and Carlton champion Chris Judd in the aftermath of the club's 2022 flag. Such a comment was another reflection of the youngster's rapid rate of improvement.

"It's a little bit surprising, the way he plays his footy," Martin says.

"He was never the quickest off the mark. Often what happens, a good runner on the track really lacks that quickness over their first 5m or so. It's been a bit of a surprise that he's playing more as a line-breaker. I expected him to be a little bit more of an outside runner with a really good top speed and really good repeat efforts.

"Obviously, as a 400m runner, you need really good top speed but you also need really good endurance as well. I expected him to be a little bit more on the outside, so it definitely was a surprise that he developed that first 5m."

The fact Holmes' breakout season has come in what was a contract year for the Geelong youngster – he put any speculation around his future to bed by signing a four-year deal through to free agency back in April – is testament to a single-minded concentration towards his footy.

Holmes had attracted significant interest from Victorian rivals while contracted last year and was again one of the most wanted players in the competition to start this campaign, continually raising his profile throughout a season where he averaged 24.4 disposals and 558m gained, kicked 13 goals and had 11 goal assists.

"On-field, he's pretty surreal," his teammate and good friend Shaun Mannagh says. "He's built over a couple of years. I remember playing him in the VFL two years ago and you knew at that stage that once he got in, he wasn't going to come out.

"Through the start of the year he had that off-field pressure of the contract situation, but it never deterred him and never worried him. He came in every day and looked to get better and he'd go out on the weekend and dominate.

"He comes from a really good family and that shows in the way he's loved around the club as well. I'm really proud of him from a mate's perspective and he's got a big couple of weeks coming up."

Indeed, Holmes has more motivation that most this September. Having missed out on being involved in the club's 2022 premiership team – he hurt his hamstring in the preliminary final and wasn't picked the following week, despite passing physical tests in the days before – there is a burning desire to be part of the next one.

Holmes showed that in the side's commanding qualifying final win over Port Adelaide, where he finished with 28 disposals, eight marks, four clearances, seven rebounds, five intercepts, six running bounces and seven score involvements to emerge as the contest's most influential player.

If the consistency and levels of performance he's demonstrated throughout the season are anything to go by – as well as his resiliency on a number of occasions already throughout his young career – then he's bound to do similar again on Saturday evening against Brisbane in the preliminary final.

"I'm just extremely proud of the maturity and growth he's showed over the last couple of years," Seccull says.

"After what happened in 2022, to miss out after the year he had was heartbreaking to see. We all know how hard premierships are to win so to be able put that heartache aside and focus on driving the group forward says a lot about the type of person he is, and I've got no doubt it's helped him become what he is today – a better player, teammate and person."