BOX HILL defender Ellie McLinden may be a relative newcomer to the Australian football, but is already looking to take her game as far as she can.

Though only a few years into her fledgling career, she is already looking to make the jump up to the AFL Women’s competition.

“It definitely is more of a goal now than ever,” she said. “Up until probably about six weeks ago it wasn’t on my mind, but I think after doing all the training with the (Hawthorn) AFL Women’s girls I’m definitely at a position where I can put myself up for the draft and hopefully I’m lucky enough get picked. But up until then it was never really a goal of mine.

“I just really love playing with my friends at SKOB (VAFA club St Kevin’s Old Boys) and now I love the environment here of Hawthorn, so I’ve loved my journey up until now and something I’m definitely looking for in the future is to take my footy to the next level.”

McLinden’s love for the game began a few years ago in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.

“I had a couple of friends down at my local football club St Kevin’s Old Boys, and they really enjoyed it,” she said. “They had just done their first year in the VAFA, and I hadn’t played team sports in a while because I had a bad injury when I was in school in my navicular, so I wasn’t able to do many team sports anymore.

“I was really big into netball at school, so that couldn’t do that any more so thought ‘why not pick up footy?’. I was into athletics at the time, so I was just sort of playing for fun and with my friends, and I think the team aspect and camaraderie, I hadn’t done anything like that in a long time, and it was sort of nothing like I’d ever experienced before, so I think that’s what really sparked my love for it.”

Her time at St Kevin’s was the first time she took to a football field. Coming from an athletics background, she played at SKOB for four years, winning a flag in that time. After some time away, she was keen to take her footy to a new level and linked up with the Hawks. The rest is history in the making.

Like many in Australia and around the world, the Covid pandemic saw McLinden’s life and career take a turn, which ultimately saw her end up at the Hawks.

“I escaped Covid lockdown and moved to Byron Bay in 2021, and was trying to organise when I was going to come home, playing at a VFLW standard, and I somehow got onto Dan Napoli (former Box Hill GM) and had a good chat to him, and he was super keen to get me down,” she said.

“Being sort of close to home, I didn’t want to travel too far so everything sort of fell into place really well and as soon as I came back I was straight into it. I trained for three weeks and then we had our first practice match.”

McLinden certainly has her hands full with a busy schedule, combining full-time study with being a high school sports coach and a high level footballer. But she prefers it that way, as she confessed that she likes a busy lifestyle and finds that the more time she has, the less likely she is to be on time to places.

Thanks to her background in athletics, McLinden believes one of her biggest strengths is her speed and explosiveness off the backline, and she says her rawness is both a strength and weakness of her game. Training with the AFLW Hawks has helped her improve in that space, but she says that is something she is still working on.