Isaac Cummins

Like many children growing up in Broken Hill, Isaac Cummings and his siblings were encouraged to play sports from a young age. He was a natural all-round and competitive athlete, playing basketball, cricket, golf and soccer as well as AFL. Supported by his parents to pursue whatever opportunities came along, the young Isaac Cummings took part in sporting competitions all around Australia.

By the time he was a teenager, Cummings knew that he wanted to be a professional AFL player, and he started training. In 2015 he made his Broken Hill league debut aged 16. He played 15 league games and, by 2016, aged only 17, he was drafted into the Greater Western Sydney (GWS) Giants. He moved to Sydney and trained hard, making his AFL debut in 2018 and still an important player for GWS. In 2017 Cummings was awarded the Kenin Sheedy Medal, North East AFL player of the year award.

From 2017 he played more than 50 AFL games as defender, and in 2021 had a ‘breakout year’ finishing sixth in the club's best and fairest count. In 2022 an ABC sports news reporter observed: ‘the unassuming back-man from Broken Hill has been ranked as an elite in the metres-gained statistic this season’.

Isaac Cummings takes his inspiration from the veteran AFL players who came before him, saying of Tex Walker: ‘When he got drafted from Broken Hill it was just a huge inspiration to try and achieve that – if I can have half the career he's had, I'm going to be pretty happy.’

The Broken Hill community has always supported the determination and motivation of its footballers and other athletes, whose outstanding successes have made sport an intrinsic part of the identity of the city and of the Far West region.

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