Lifeline | Ellie Carpenter

So good to see you Ellie. How did you get into football? What called you to the game? When I was little, I grew up playing everything, every sport. I couldn't imagine my life without sport in it. Since I was three years old, I was running everywhere. Got out of the car, ran to the cafe. I was just always doing something. Obviously now with my injury, that was so hard for me mentally to be like back at square one, you know, I was learning how to walk again and just doing everything very intently and, you know, focusing so much on the things that you would just do automatically in daily life. So getting back to some level of physical activity as your rehab goes along, that's been an important part of maintaining your mental health? For sure. I think when you do something new or you hit a milestone, that just gives you more motivation to keep going. When you hit those little milestones, you're very emotional. You kind of just want to cry and, you know, you look back at videos or things and you couldn't walk ten weeks ago, but today you're jumping. Once that injury has happened to you, you kind of realise how resilient you can be or you are, because I didn't know I could have done this, you know, and there's days obviously that you feel like you want to give up. You can't be bothered to do a session, but I think those are the days and when you go and you actually do that session, it's how good you feel after and how much progress you've just made in the three hours you've been training. That's one thing that's so cool about sport is each day is a new day to get better, get stronger, and I think seeing that difference and watching how far you've come since when I hit rock bottom, it's quite cool. Sport brings people together. It brings happiness, joy, competitiveness. I've learnt so much about myself through sport, whether that's on the pitch, off the pitch, in every way of life.