He’s made his name as one of the fiercest competitors the AFL has ever seen, so it should come as no surprise to discover how Hayden Ballantyne’s first Auskick game panned out.

“I got sent off because I threw the footy at the umpire and I got in trouble,” Ballantyne said.

While his overly competitive temperament has got the Mandurah lad into mischief right throughout his career, it’s also been his greatest asset.

His Fremantle Dockers teammates will tell you that ‘Ballas’ gets just as infuriated when he’s beaten in a training drill as he does if bested in an AFL game.

Playing AFL has been his dream since he first pulled on the number 1 jumper as a seven-year-old.

“I always wore number 1 because the sizes went by the numbers and number 1 was always the smallest,” Ballantyne said.

While Ballantyne was always the smallest kid on the field, his performances didn’t follow suit.

“I won a few association best and fairests and club best and fairests,” he said.

“I could always play the game, it was only my height that was a bit of a restriction for me.”

But he was still good enough to be selected in Peel Thunder’s development squads.

In 2005, when he was playing colts, Ballantyne got a call up to the winless league side coached by Geelong great Garry Hocking.

“The first league game of the year that Peel won was my debut,” Ballantyne said.

“But then we didn’t win many for the rest of the year.”

He managed a total of five league games that year, but he became a more permanent fixture in the side in 2006 and 2007, playing as a midfielder.

In each of the first three seasons he played league, Ballantyne nominated for the AFL Draft. But his dreams of being picked up fizzled.

“I was pretty flat, I missed out three years in a row,” he said.

In 2008, Ballantyne was moved into a new small forwardposition, and it paid huge dividends.

“I started kicking a lot more goals and eventually won the Sandover Medal that year,” he said.

Some might believe it was an increased level of commitment that helped Ballantyne improve so sharply in 2008 compared to the previous three seasons.

But anyone that knows Ballantyne also knows he gave nothing less than 100 per cent to anything he’d ever attempted.

The effort and ability was always the same in his eyes, he just needed to turn heads.

“It was the move to the forward line that really got me noticed,” Ballantyne said.

“There was a lot of small midfielders going around and some clubs were looking for more small forwards than they were small midfielders.
“I was thinking 2008 might have been my last crack at being drafted, so I really gave it everything.”

Fremantle selected a 21-year-old Ballantyne with pick 21 to turn his dream into reality.

“I was obviously over the moon,” he said.

“I was lucky enough to stay in my home state and I’m at a great club now that’s really pushing towards something great.

“I’m very privileged to be where I am and I’m thankful to the Fremantle Dockers.”

Ballantyne will play his 100th AFL game in Saturday’s match against Melbourne in Darwin.

“I’m obviously very proud, 99 games down and hopefully a few more to go,” he said.

When you ask a footballer how he would have responded if he were told, before being drafted, that he’d be a 100-game AFL player, the usual response would be along the lines of ‘I wouldn’t have believed them’.

But not Ballantyne.

“It was something I’ve always wanted, so if someone said I was going to play 100 AFL games, I would have said, ‘I can’t wait’,” he said.

“The determination was always there, I always wanted to get there, and I got there.”