When Brian Taylor first began his VFL career while working as a plumber, never could have he imagined the media career he would carve out decades later.

The same can be said for one-time aspiring school teacher and basketball star Ruby Schleicher, who now splits her duties between captaining Collingwood’s AFLW side and working for Fox Footy and Triple M.

The pair, who joined each other for the maiden episode of the Club’s new podcast Common Thread, compared their entry into the media landscape in a wide-ranging chat.

“The media’s been something I never thought would happen as a plumber – here I am unblocking dunnies and digging holes – whoever thought,” Taylor said

“I got into the media really through opportunities at football by not refusing interviews.

“I don’t know how you got your way in but for me, Leigh Matthews would always say to us, ‘don’t talk to the media, if you have to talk to the media, certainly don’t tell them the truth’.

“That was the attitude then and I adopted the opposite attitude, I needed to prove to people I could talk.

Schleicher, who started out with Fox Footy in 2022 as an intern, only had experience in media with the Pies’ digital channels before that, saying it lit the fuse for her love for holding the microphone.

“(I was) pretty much the same. Like I said, saying yes to everything, whether it was the Club saying ‘we’re going to give you a mic and just walk around and talk to the girls and behind the scenes we’ll see what we can get’,” Schleicher explained.

“They’d just let me go rogue and I reckon probably a third of it they couldn’t use because it would go too rogue but the two thirds they could use, it would get received really well.

The pair, while having only briefly met before recoding the episode, quickly hit it off as they discovered both the similarities in their journeys and personalities.

Their penchant for talking was identified by both with their tongue’s firmly in cheek, as they explained how their, at times, larger than life personalities contributed to getting them into the industry.

“I’m obviously not an introvert – I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been a bit of a show-off,” Schleicher put to Taylor.

“I noticed you’re not short of a word, Rubes,” was a smirking Taylor’s response.

While Taylor has been involved in commentary for both TV and radio for three decades now, the 63-year-old explained it was functions that lit the fuse for his intrigue with getting behind the microphone.

“I remember very early, maybe in my first year or two as a young kid playing footy at Richmond, that I went to a function with it must’ve been with a group of people there,” he said.

“There were footballers speaking and there was the host speaking and I went ‘wow, look at those people, they can speak in public’.

“I’m looking at them in amazement thinking ‘I could never do that’.

“As I kept going to these functions over the time, I really studied the hosts in particular and I went ‘these people are really boring’. They’ve got the easiest job of the day, the hardest job is being the guest where you’ve got to entertain and you’ve got to get laughs.

“So, what I started doing were functions and I’d do a lot of functions from a board room function to a Pie night to a charity event.

“I found that it was that that gave me the confidence in my current job now…I reckon my whole media training came out of live functions.”

Schleicher meanwhile is still in the infancy of her media career, having been part of Fox Footy and Triple M for the past few seasons.

Things have ramped up in 2025 however, with the 27-year-old a regular boundary rider, newsreader and panellist on Fox Footy’s coverage.

“This is my first full year of working in the men’s space. I’ve done special comments in the women’s space which is obviously a lot shorter of a game, not the same resources,” she said.

“Then you walk into the men’s and the resources that go into it to make game day happen is incredible.

“You’re working with all these incredible former players who you need to try and keep up with and hold your own.

“I think (I want to) probably continue to develop in that. I love standing next to people and being challenged and things being thrown at me and having to think on my feet on live television.”

When questioned on whether she would like to try her hand at commentary, Schleicher was open about her trepidation to do so – with the tenured Taylor offering some sage advice and praise.

“I don’t know if I could ever be a play-by-play – that scares the s**t out of me,” Schleicher said.

“It’s probably one of those things I look at and I go ‘I don’t know if I could ever do that’.

“It’s incredible to me.

“It’s just footy vocab you know,” Taylor replied.

“The same thing happens in a game of footy all the time – someone kicks it, someone handballs and someone marks it.

“If you’ve got 50 different ways of describing the kick – he stabs it, he slices it, he wobbles it, he mongrels it – this is what I say when you’ve footy vocab, if you’ve got that it becomes easy because the re-call is there.

“The amount of words that you’ve got into this podcast you would be a walk-up start to be a commentator I reckon.

“I see host in you. I look at you now and see host written all over you.”

Aside their links to the media industry, Schleicher and Taylor’s episode also sees them explore their childhoods spent in WA, their initial love for basketball, and the similarities amongst their different eras spent playing in the black and white.