Young Knights hooker Luke Huth is tackling life's challenges head-on

Both will tell you they see something special in the Lakes United junior.

Dureau, his coach in the under-20s last season, said this about the emerging Knights hooker after he won the Jersey Flegg player of the year award and also featured in NSW Cup.

"He's a really intelligent player and he's tough. His vision and smarts from dummy-half are absolutely second-to-none. With his work ethic and skill-set, he's got a massive future."

Along with those accolades, you can also throw courageous into the mix as well.

For the entirety of his career, the slightly built 20-year-old has struggled with his weight but has been throwing himself at much bigger bodies without fear or favour.

At the same time, he is in a constant fight to keep type 1 insulin dependent diabetes from impacting his dream of playing in the NRL.

Huth is in the middle of a full-time pre-season with the Knights senior squad after earning a development contract. And with Danny Levi on the move to Manly, a pathway has opened up for him.

But right now, he is happy to bide his time and continue his apprenticeship with a big part of his focus on simply beefing up his frame. If only it was simply.

Huth might just have been the only male in Australia to actually lose weight over Christmas despite eating like there was no tomorrow.

"I got up to 85.6 kgs but got a bit crook at our camp in Tamworth before Christmas and I'm back down to 84 now despite eating as much as I could during our break," he said. "It's been a battle for me."

Which is not even the half of it.

Most Knights fans wouldn't be aware Huth is a diabetic and facing the problems the condition presents for a professional athlete.

He says he was seven or eight when first diagnosed and 11 or 12 when a bad diabetic "hypo" attack left him mentally scarred and considering giving up footy altogether.

"I was in the car with mum in Canberra and my sugar was low and we were racing somewhere to get some juice when I passed out," he recalled.

"Thankfully, a hospital was only a few minutes away so mum took me straight there and I think I was in getting tests done for a few days. I just got really dizzy and light-headed and lost my motor skills before blacking out.

"I was in a pretty bad way, not so much from the hypo itself but from the anxiety and depression which came afterwards."

Once home, Huth struggled to leave the house and it was six months before he was dealing well enough with his anxiety and depression just to be able to go back to school.

"Most diabetics would have four insulin injections a day but while I'm training, I can sometimes have as many as eight and I'm testing myself 15 to 20 times a day which is four or five times the average," he said.

"But back then, my anxiety got that bad, I was testing myself 50 times a day because I was so worried it would happen again. I wasn't in a good way. I was close to stopping playing footy altogether, that's how big an effect it had on me for up to two years.

"Every day was trial and error and learning different ways of how to deal with it and cope with it and I hid it a fair bit back then. I didn't want people to know that I even had it.

"Once you get it, it's always a part of you and you learn to deal with it in different ways. But it still affects me."

Huth is constantly testing sugar levels when training or playing just to make sure it is under control and leaves a stash of snake lollies and juice poppas with trainers on the sideline just in case.

"It's not always easy to identify when it might be affecting you at training because you don't know whether the lethargy is just because your lungs are hanging out your backside so it gets a bit tough," he said.

"I try to test myself regularly whenever we get a bit of a break for a drink or whatever."

The Knights trainers have become his own personal pit-crew.

"During a game, the trainer will have it [a kit] on him and whenever I get a spare second to do it, I'll do it. So at a scrum break or injury or after a try, I might test myself and have an injection there and then if I need it.

"I try to have my level as low as possible before a game because it will spike and when that happens, you tend to get fatigued easier. My whole game sort of rides on whether my levels are spot on so I've got to really stay on top of it. It's a full-time job."

But just like with his weight issues, Huth never uses it as an excuse and won't hear of it holding back his career.

"I wouldn't be training like this and going through it all if I didn't know how to handle it. It's obviously my main goal to crack first grade one day," he said. "I'm not looking too far ahead though. It's all just about working hard and learning and we'll see what happens."