MELBOURNE has recruited 2014 Melbourne Vixens championship player Erin Hoare for its 2018 AFLW season.

The 28-year-old netballer-turned-footballer has been claimed as a rookie and couldn’t be happier.


From Vixen to Demon, former netballer Erin Hoare joins Melbourne (Photo: Matthew Goodrope)

“I’m super stoked and so excited to join Melbourne – it’s just a great opportunity,” Hoare told melbournefc.com.au.

“I already play with Lily [Mithen] and Rocky [Cranston] and it’ll be great to work with them and with the support of the Melbourne footy club. My footy experience is new – I’m very new to the sport – so my initial goals were around getting the basics right.

“I very much believe in my ability to develop more and I just love the game the more I train and play. I’ll love it more now, playing at Melbourne.”

Hoare, who is not related to another recent Melbourne rookie recruit Kate Hore (different surname spelling), started her career with the Melbourne Vixens in 2013.

After playing in the 2014 ANZ Championship with the Vixens, she crossed to the NSW Swifts for the 2015 season.

After one season with the Swifts, Hoare focused on her studies.

A student at Deakin University, she undertook an international exchange placement at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, where she completed a PHD. 

With her background in psychology and health, she is a doctor in her field, Hoare gained employment at a heart and diabetes institute in Melbourne and a school in Geelong, which focuses on positive education and adolescent mental health and wellbeing.

Now, the 194cm tall, who plays in the ruck, she said couldn’t wait to start her career with Melbourne, where she believes her elite sporting history will help her marking and positioning around the ground, and her ability to adapt to the rigours of pre-season training.

“My netball background will help during those hard slogs of pre-season, which I’m really looking forward to,” she said.

“I know being tall helps, as it does in lots of sport, but I just don’t want to be a tall player – I want to be a footballer and a good footballer.

“I think that I still need to work on the basics of footy, so they become more natural and refined and then I’ll get into my ruck craft and work with the midfielders at Melbourne.”

Hoare said she has no regrets switching from netball to football.

“Netball was very much my chosen sport as a young person. I’d never played any representative netball through juniors, so I was 22 or 23 years old before I played netball up in Melbourne. The same year I was playing, I got picked up by the Melbourne Vixens as a rookie, so I was 23,” she said.

“I spent two years with the Vixens and then I relocated to Sydney and played a season up there with the Swifts. That elite sporting background that has certainly helped me cross over to footy.

“My footy background is pretty short. I played in high school once a year in the girls’ tournament and that was the only opportunity I knew of to play. Otherwise, it was just kicking the footy around with my brothers and extended family.

“Earlier this year, I had some friends who had crossed over from netball to footy and they were training with the Geelong VFLW team and said some really amazing things about footy.

“I hadn’t been playing netball, so I got into footy and took up the opportunity, so I’ve been playing with Geelong this season and it’s gone from there.”

Hailing from the Geelong region, Hoare said her family was mixture of Cats and Hawthorn supporters. But she had no doubt who she followed now.

“So, it was a bit of a mix in my family. I just like good football, but now I’m red and blue,” she said with a laugh.