It helped him survive various tumbles growing up on a farm near Maitland in the heart of South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula. It's helped him cope with a litany of injuries through 12 seasons with Richmond and Port Adelaide. And it's helped him remain sanguine in the two years since others feared for him after a shocking collision with a teammate.

Just part of the game, is Schulz’s attitude to the wear and tear that AFL football takes on the human body. What was more confronting as he pondered a lengthy spell on the sidelines was the fear that he may never get to experience the thrill of being part of a successful team.

As he lay in hospital recovering from serious internal bleeding, Schulz was in his 10th year as a senior footballer for precious little reward. By then, he’d played a total of 113 games with the Tigers and the Power for just 37 wins, a strike rate of 33 per cent.

In his seven years at Punt Road, Richmond hadn’t made finals and only twice finished any higher than 12th. In Schulz’s first year with Port Adelaide, coach Mark Williams was sacked mid-season, and in 2012, his third with the Power, things had deteriorated even further, with Williams’ replacement Matthew Primus sacked mid-term.

“I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it,” he reflects on the fear of being cast perpetually as part of a losing team.

“Before I got to play finals, I was very open about the fact that’s all I wanted to do. But if you dwell on that sort of stuff too much, it comes out in your personality, comes out in the way you train, and that’s no good. You’ve got to try to be as positive as you can around a football club, especially in those dark times.”

And finally for Schulz, who turned 29 on Friday, the positivity has paid off. Few Port Adelaide players better exemplify the feel-good story that has been Port Adelaide’s remarkable resurgence under the coaching of Ken Hinkley.

Schulz last year did get to see September action; his 141st game was Port’s upset win over Collingwood. There was a second final a week later against Geelong. And not coincidentally, his side’s upturn has coincided with the best football of his career.

Since Schulz got out of hospital in June 2012, he’s played in 33 games for 78 goals and leads the AFL goalkicking with 15 after his seven-goal haul against the Brisbane Lions last Saturday. His average of 2.3 contested marks a game and his excellent conversion rate of 83.3 per cent are also career highs. He’s kicked 170 goals for Port in 75 games. In 71 games for the Tigers, he managed only 58.

“I’m really enjoying my footy at the moment,” he says. “I’m confident about what I’m going to be able put out on the field each week, and I’m confident knowing that if I’m not having a good run in a certain part of a game, I can change something and still have an impact.”

Schulz certainly hasn’t lost his preparedness to launch himself at the ball or opponent without reservation, which is remarkable in itself given the seriousness of the injury he sustained when he collided with Justin Westhoff during Port’s round 12 game against the Western Bulldogs two seasons ago.

“It wasn’t a great deal of fun,” Schulz says of the clash, which left him in intensive care of a hospital ward with serious internal bleeding.

He had typically run back with the flight of the ball into an oncoming pack. “Westy’s knee went into my stomach and got me with a decent amount of force,” he says.

“It pushed through into my back and burst my lumbar artery. I ended up having a blood clot in my stomach that was about the size of a small stick of mettwurst, and it was sitting vertically on my left side running down to my hip flexor.

“I couldn’t take blood thinners or anything because the clot was just like a sponge. I didn’t have to have surgery or have any of my bowel removed or anything like that; just had to wait for my body to get rid of it naturally. It was a pretty ordinary couple of weeks.”

But he returned to the game seven weeks later unscarred mentally, so much so that in the first game of last year against Melbourne he launched himself into another pack so high that the resultant grab was only just pipped for mark of the year.

That, he says, will never change. “I just enjoy being out with my mates and playing footy too much to be worrying about what could happen, I guess,” he says.

“People probably say I’m a little bit crazy on the field at times and go for things I shouldn’t, but I train exactly the same way, because I know if I don’t, it’s not going to happen in games. I’m a firm believer in that old cliché, you play the way you train.

“Kenny [Hinkley] and ‘Burgo’ [fitness manager Darren Burgess] try to tell me to back off a little bit, but I can’t really do that. I just sort of go into automatic pilot. Everyone is at me to be careful not to get injured, but my response usually is if I didn’t do that, they probably wouldn’t like me as a player.”

What has changed, though, is the way Schulz thinks through his football, specifically finding an answer to the lack of consistency not only from game to game but throughout even one match, which dogged his time at Richmond.

“Without wanting to sound arrogant or anything, I started to realise that I could play AFL footy. But my training habits changed, too, and it became not about trying to take mark of the year or kick six goals a game, but being around the footy as much as I could. To hit a body or get a tackle to keep myself involved even if I’m not getting a touch

“I know if I’m around the football, the offensive side will eventually come. All my stats will say, when I come in and do my reviews, that if I’m down in my defensive and hard stuff, generally I’ve had a poorer game.”

Schulz knows coming to grips with the demands of AFL football took him a lot longer than many of his contemporaries. Now it feels as though a frustrating puzzle has been finally put together.

“I’d be the first to say I probably went along for the ride a little bit more when I was at Richmond. I didn’t grow up till I was 23 or 24, and started realising that I actually wanted to do it and could do it, and that if I didn’t change something it was going to be gone and my career was going to be wasted.

“I wish I could go back to then and give myself a bit of a shake-up, but at the same time if I’d done that I may not have turned out to be the person I am today. I’m proud of who I am now and proud of the footy I’m playing at the moment, but I also want to keep getting better.”

Same goes for his team. Having emerged from perhaps their darkest hours at around the same moment, both Port Adelaide and its revitalised spearhead are determined to make up for lost time.