Will Hoskin-Elliott was a Collingwood fan growing up, so crossing over to the Club at the end of 2016 was already allowing him to live out a childhood dream.
But he came into the Pies with knowledge he hadn’t previously been aware of when he entered the league with GWS four years earlier.
While up in NSW, a woman named Pauline Allan claiming to be fifth cousins with Hoskin-Elliott reached out him to enlighten him on his family history.
Hoskin-Elliott was unaware, but Pauline’s father Les – and Hoskin-Elliott’s Great-Grand Father as it turns out – had changed his last name at a young age from Norris to Elliott, for reasons unknown.
The story has a lot of moving parts, as relayed to the then 22-year-old, but there was the nugget of Hoskin-Elliott’s football lineage within it.
The discovery was that Les’ father was Charlie Norris – a 1910 premiership player with Collingwood and Hoskin-Elliott’s Great-Great Grand Father.
It’s a lot to take in, especially after having no awareness of it in the first two decades of your life, but it’s something Hoskin-Elliott and his family thoroughly embraces now.
“It was sort of out of the blue that my dad’s cousins found out about it,” Hoskin-Elliott says of the discovery.
“When I was playing for the Giants there was a family in Newcastle that had all his medals and premiership caps and we were somehow related down the line and they got in contact with me and brought it all in for me to have a look at.
“It’s pretty cool to know that we’ve got another chance at doing what he did all those years ago.
“It’d be pretty cool to win one and I was a Pies fan as a kid so not even knowing about that and then finding out that there’s a connection is pretty awesome.”
Now, 113 years later, Hoskin-Elliott has the chance to bring a second premiership to the family.
The full circle moment doesn’t stop there, with Hoskin-Elliott’s Great-Great Grand Father crossing over to Fitzroy in the mid 1910’s and winning premierships in 1913 and 1916.
Now as he prepares to take on the Lions in the year’s decider, the Collingwood-Lions history will be thrust right into the spotlight for Hoskin-Elliott once again.
“It’s crazy because he won a flags for Fitzroy so in 2018 so as soon as we made the Grand Final my family came out and were like ‘100% Pies have won it, it’s almost 100 years to the day since the premiership so it’ll run in the family’,” he says.
“We obviously lost it and it was heartbreaking but now to have that chance to do it again and it’s unreal.
“We didn’t get the win but you just lived out a childhood dream so now we just need to win one.”
Last Friday was also a moment he won’t forget, after beating his old side to confirm the Pies’ place in the 2023 decider.
While he says coming up against the Giants isn’t as big as it once was, playing it big games at the MCG like the Preliminary Final is exactly why he came to the Club.
“It was one of those ones where it’s a nail-biter all night and we just held off in the last quarter so it was perfect,” he says.
“It’s not as big as it was, now it’s just like a normal game. I’m a Pie now.”
