The Fremantle Football Club celebrated its annual Bravery Awards in conjunction with the South Metropolitan Area Health Service on Friday morning, with young players presenting awards to 12 special patients.
Among those was Scott Joyce, who was left paralysed from the chest down after an incident in an amateur football game last year when he was playing for Mosman Park.
First-year Fremantle forward Chris Mayne and the rest of his teammates were inspired by the zest for life shown not only by Joyce, but by all of those at the ceremony.
"When I first found out that I was going to be presenting a couple of awards I was stoked, especially finding out about how Scott was also a football player and to go through the injury he has," Mayne said.
"It makes you start to appreciate life a lot more when you see what hard things people have to go through.
"To be a football player that is healthy and living life to the fullest is awesome, but if we can get behind those people not so lucky then hopefully they enjoy life as much as we do."
Mayne has shown enough this season to suggest he is the future of Fremantle and that maturity shows when he talks about the criticism the club has faced for blowing four successive three-quarter time leads.
"We don’t really dwell on the bad things, the things that have gone wrong or what people say, we just look at the positives and focus on the next week straight away,” he said.
“We are 100 percent focused to do well against Port Adelaide this week and hopefully everyone can get there to support us.
"We'd like to play four quarters and win the game. We're confident that will come soon. We won't dwell on them fading out in games; we will just worry about getting our own performance right and to play four quarters."
Mayne said he and the rest of the team was determined to begin the turnaround this Sunday.
"It was a strange feeling after the loss to Carlton as it didn’t feel like the game was over and for some reason I felt we had another quarter to still go back out there to win. It was weird, but we just look forward to Port Adelaide now," he said.
"We have had a couple of sessions where we've got together to try and build a closer bond and what we are trying to do is focus on the next game to try to turn things around."
Bravery Award recipients:
JORDAN HINDER–DOCHERTY (6, Singleton)
SCOTT JOYCE (Mosman Park)
ETHAN LYNAM (7, Kelmscott)
SOPHIE LAWSON (6, Kardinya)
WILLIAM VALENTINO (7, Clarkson)
JOSHUA MARTIN (5, Port Kennedy)
HAZIM DARWISH (17, Kelmscott)
ALEC THOMAS (17, Mandurah)
RUMON OSWICK-KOK (6, Pinjarra)
TAGHI REZAI (13, Spearwood)
REBECCA STANLEY (16, Canningvale)
SAM HURST (15, Attadale)
