“Welcome to the Roosters!”

Dom Young had just returned to Sydney after being released from hospital in England when he was thrust into a brutal pre-season army camp with his new Sydney Roosters team-mates.

As one of the fastest players in the NRL, Young was conditioned for the running, but he noticed the six kilograms he’d lost when the players were forced to carry an army stretcher from Allianz Stadium to Centennial Park and back.

Then there was swimming, more running and a sleepless night spent at Randwick Army Barracks.

It wasn’t the introduction to his new club that the 22-year-old wing sensation expected as he was still recovering from a virus that resulted in him spending two weeks in a hospital ward and missing England’s series against Tonga.

“They said to me, ‘we’re not going to throw you straight in, we will just ease you in, it will be good for you to meet some of the boys and connect’,” Young recalled during an interview about his rise for the Hisense Upgrade Season series.

“Then as soon as that whistle blew, I just did everything. It was horrible, it was torture, I was struggling. That definitely was some welcome. It was like, ‘welcome to the Roosters’.”

Young, who is set to be one of the stars of the NRL finals series after helping the Roosters to a top four berth, had agreed to join the club after three seasons at the Knights. However, his future seemed uncertain as he spent weeks in a crowded hospital ward in Leeds.

Young on the run

A sinus infection he had developed before flying to England for the series against Tonga spread to his brain while staying with his parents before the team entered camp.

“I basically had this abscess on the lining of my brain that was causing a lot of pressure,” Young said. “It was just like the worst kind of head pain you could imagine.

“I was just fully weak. When I went to hospital, I could barely move. I was pretty much like a zombie, and for a few weeks I was on the strongest antibiotics system in the ward.

As an athlete, you think you are healthy, you don’t think that kind of thing is going to happen to you. It was pretty scary.

 

“It was a day or two before camp. At first I didn’t think anything of it, but then it got to a point where I just couldn’t get out of bed. My head was banging, and I was shaking with fever; I was cold, I was hot, and then I just couldn’t open my eyes.

“I was in a ward with quite a few other sick people, so you wake up and you are kind of looking at a full room – there was no privacy or anything. “I had five or six people in the room with me and my parents could only visit me for an hour or two hours each day, so it was rough.

“I lost quite a bit of weight, and I just felt a lot weaker within myself as well because I wasn’t eating anything. “Even when I got out of hospital, I wasn’t really allowed to lift weights or do any strenuous exercise because it wasn’t safe for me with all the antibiotics I was taking. They were pretty strong doses.”

“I didn’t end up playing any games and I missed the whole camp, so I wanted to get back and get into the swing of things.”

Point to prove

Despite the setback to his start with the Roosters, Young has scored 19 tries in 19 matches this season to maintain the strike rate of a try per game he set with Newcastle last season.

Yet when Knights coach Adam O’Brien convinced the English teen, whose talents had also been identified by dual code great Jason Robinson, to become the first player of Jamaican heritage in the NRL, there were sceptics on both sides of the globe.