WHEN AFL CEO Andrew Dillon started reading out names one by one last November, everyone was inside the Victory Room for the 2025 Telstra AFL Draft. Well, almost everyone. Latrelle Pickett was hiding in plain sight outside Marvel Stadium.

One prominent player manager spotted Pickett on the concourse and grinned, realising something was afoot, while an experienced recruiting boss rewound the broadcast when he saw him enter the Victory Room just before Essendon made its first selection at pick No.9.

Pickett had never been to Melbourne before landing at Tullamarine Airport that morning. He had only ever left his home state once before. He had been invited to the draft at the last minute, two days out. No one had ever been invited this late before.

Someone was going to take him in the first round. It was just a matter of who and when. Melbourne had a plan, but list boss Tim Lamb, national recruiting manager Jason Taylor and pro scout Kelly O'Donnell have been in this business for a long enough to know not to make many any promises. They are hard to keep.

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Even if they didn't land him, the Demons wanted Pickett and his parents in the room to savour a moment hundreds of thousands of kids dream of, but few experience. Kevin Sheehan made sure that happened. The AFL's Talent Ambassador is involved with the invite list. He makes hundreds of calls to list managers, recruiters and agents to gauge who should be there, putting the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. 

One name came up late. 'Shifter' called Pickett's manager, Peter Munt from Vivid Sport, on the Monday of draft week to invite his client on the down-low. That's why the pair was standing outside as the picks started coming off the board. 

"That's when we just snuck in through the back. Next thing you know, Melbourne picks me up at 12," Pickett tells AFL.com.au.

Only a select few knew he was in the room, but soon the world would know when Dillon returned to the stage for Melbourne's second selection. They had back-to-back picks and were always going to take someone else first – they ended up selecting Eastern Ranges defender Xavier Taylor at pick 11 – and Latrelle second, given the history of the pick. That wasn't lost on the Demons.

Pick No.12 is known as the Indigenous pick. Gavin Wanganeen was selected with it in 1989 by Essendon. Shaun Burgoyne went there in 2000 to Port Adelaide. Then the Hawks swooped on Cyril Rioli in 2007. Jy Simpkin was selected there in 2016, before Kysaiah Pickett – Latrelle's older cousin – was taken at No.12 in 2019.

There was another surprise. He didn't know it, but Latrelle wasn't the only Pickett to sneak in through the service lift inside the guts of Marvel Stadium. Cousin Kozzy was about to enter the stage to present him with a Melbourne jumper. Taylor had organised this with Melbourne Indigenous player development manager Matthew Whelan. Everything, somehow, had gone to plan.

"I was messaging Kozzy that day saying, 'I'll see you after' or something," Latrelle recalls six months later. "We were planning to catch up and he just kept texting me normally, sending snaps or videos and just having a laugh. And then he wasn't doing any of that. And I was thinking, 'what's going on here?'. I didn't really know. I had no clue he was there out the back. It was just a lot of emotions going on at the time."

While Kozzy snuck up on Latrelle that night, the younger Pickett didn't sneak up on recruiters overnight. They all knew plenty about him by then. No player at the end of at least his second full season after underage footy had been selected so high this century. Lewis Jetta was 20 when he went at pick No.14. Harry Taylor and Isaac Smith were both 21 when they went at No.17 and 19, respectively. So how did someone who was about to turn 20, who spent almost the entire season playing in the SANFL reserves for Glenelg, get selected so high after such limited exposure at state league or elite under-18 level?

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PICKETT had been on the radar of clubs before when he played three under-18 games for Norwood in 2023, but when he spent most of that year and all of 2024 playing for Tumby Bay back home in the Great Flinders Football League, he had receded from view. It didn't appear like he wanted to get drafted. That was until Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera's dad picked up the phone.

Terry Milera watched Pickett play in the Nunga Next Generation Carnival in Port Lincoln in October 2024 and saw something special. Milera knew what he was looking for. He played 30 games for St Kilda between 2012 and 2014, but then returned to South Australia for family reasons and continued his career at Glenelg. He still had contacts at the Bays and organised a meeting with head of football Paul Sandercock. The rest was up to Pickett.

"Nas' dad basically recruited me and got me to Glenelg. He called me after the carnival and just said, 'I'll talk to Glenelg if you want to go over, just don't let me down'," Pickett says.

"I had a meeting with Glenelg. Paul was like, 'mate, you've got three weeks to train' [before you start pre-season]. I trained on my own, basically every day and then finally got to the training with Glenelg and just never looked back."

Moving to Adelaide was a defining choice. If Pickett stayed in Port Lincoln, he was on a road to nowhere. He knew that trouble lurked around different corners. Instead, he packed up his life and relocated 650km away from home to chase a dream Kozzy was living in the AFL, moving in with his aunt and uncle, then in with one of his cousins.

"If I didn't get out of Lincoln, I wouldn't be here now," he says. "That move was massive. I grew up with Mum and Dad and three older brothers and (I've) got like 10 nieces and nephews from three older brothers. So just a big family. It was definitely hard moving away from home, but I guess it was something I just needed to do. I didn't want to waste my talent back home.

"It was a bit hard to just fall into love with what you're doing back home. You're just always with mates just having fun. You can get stuck into that just for too long. You just don't want to leave. Hopefully the next generations get out of Lincoln, get over to Adelaide, go to school, and just follow your goals. Home's always going to be there; you can go back whenever."

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MELBOURNE Football Club had been tracking Pickett for years. Taylor had first met with him inside the lounge bar at The Stamford Plaza Hotel in 2023. Latrelle and his dad Brendon had driven almost seven hours for the meeting. The Demons rated his talent back then, but needed to see more commitment from him if they were going to consider drafting him. They kept tabs on him from afar, as others did.

Fremantle was the first club to meet with him last year. Pickett kicked three goals in his first game for Glenelg's reserves, then two more the following week. The antennae went up for those in the know. Dockers recruiting boss David McMullin sat down with him in Adelaide over a coffee. Fremantle had just plucked one of Pickett's close friends from Port Lincoln, Isaiah Dudley, out of the SANFL, via the pre-season supplemental selection period, and were also trying to lure Kysaiah across the country at the time. The connections ran deep.

Both the Demons and Dockers were keen on Latrelle ahead of the Mid-Season Rookie Draft, but he hadn't nominated for the national draft the year before, and was therefore ineligible. Exemptions have been made in the past, but his agent Munt didn't fight then AFL player movement manager Ned Guy for one. It wasn't in his client's best interest to arrive at a club at the start of June, build connections with strangers, and have potentially only four months to prove himself for another contract. But that meeting with Fremantle lit a flame inside Pickett. It showed him he wasn't that far off a list spot, even though it felt like that playing in the reserves at Glenelg.

"It definitely did [serve as motivation]," he says. "It just gave me that extra burst of knowledge (to) just to keep grinding. I didn't fill out a form or something, so I wasn't allowed (to be picked up). But that was when I thought, 'Oh, I actually might have a crack at this'."

Taylor paid attention to Pickett's start to 2025. The next time he travelled to Adelaide he met with Pickett early in the season. They organised to catch up on The Parade at Sfizii Cucina e Caffe ahead of a Norwood game. Taylor got there early, but Pickett was already there. He was different, far more confident than two years earlier. "I'm always early and I was looking for a good spot to sit where it'd be bit quiet, and I hear from behind me 'Jase' with real confidence. I turned around, there's Latrelle standing. I couldn't believe the way he approached me. I thought, 'OK, he's grown up a bit'," Taylor recalls.

It was there that Pickett revealed that he'd lost his licence for drink driving at the start of the year. He had blown over the following morning after a night out. He owned it. Recruiters were aware of other minor issues in previous years. The Demons did their background work, like they do with any recruit, but discovered his character was sound. "He just got influenced at home by the wrong people at times, I reckon. And part of that's your own choice, but sometimes you need to remove yourself, I reckon," Taylor says.

Word was starting to spread about Pickett's form. Soon, almost every club had watched him play live, turning up earlier to SANFL games to watch him play in the reserves, then leaving before the main event. It wasn't until the final round of the season that a spot opened up in the senior team under Darren Reeves, who has since moved to Port Adelaide as an assistant coach.

Pickett kicked four goals on debut against Central District to cement his status as a draft bolter. He played the first two finals, then played in the reserves Grand Final, where he kicked four more goals at Adelaide Oval. A fortnight later, he met with every club at the Draft Combine at the MCG. Sitting inside one corporate box after another in the Olympic Stand, Pickett told them all of his mistake. Again, he owned it.

"It's a mistake I made and take full ownership of what I've done," he says. "I can't take it back. I can't go back in time, and I would have done this differently. It's happened. I was pretty honest because I didn't want to bloody get drafted lying my way through. You get drafted and then all secrets come back to you. They're just going to bite you. If you have meetings, just be honest, because they're only going to bite you in the long run."

That incident is a small detail in his story, but more than a handful of recruiters spoken to for this story said his honesty was significant. Munt started managing him in April last year; he first spotted him by chance, playing in the reserves at Glenelg, a game he only attended because his flight out of Adelaide had been cancelled. His advice to Pickett was to be honest to recruiters. Put your hand up. Own it.

"Honestly, it was everything, I think," Munt says. "Things weren't perfect in how he'd worked through, but you just knew he's not a bad kid. He did some dumb things, and he did some things that he puts his hand up and owns, but they were never malicious things that he ever did. It was just him being a kid. I think that's been the big learning curve. And I think this is why he's doing what he's doing now, because he doesn't want to let that ever slip again.

"I think having those honest conversations and putting it all out on the table was important; clubs just want to know what they're getting. They want to know what the skeletons in the closet are, they want to have an understanding so that they can support the athlete and the person coming into their club. 

"Is this kid genuine? Is he a good person? Can we wrap our arm around him to actually make him continue to strive to be a better person when he gets to our footy club?”

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MELBOURNE underwent mass change last year from top to bottom. From the president to the coach to the CEO to the stars. But one department that didn't change was the recruiting team. They identified a need to infuse a little dash of the exotic into a team that, aside from Kysaiah Pickett, could otherwise be labelled workmanlike.

"Latrelle was a player type we needed. He can really cover the ground effortlessly. We didn't have that style of player with that creativity I don't reckon and he allowed Kozzy more midfield time. I was impressed with his growth and maturity at Glenelg, but well aware that there's still road to travel," Taylor says.

Taylor, Lamb and Melbourne's recruiting team met with Pickett and his family in Adelaide in October. By then, they knew he was a first-round pick. He had rocketed up boards across every war room. They did plenty of work in the background, before executing their plan on Draft night.

They call him 'Trelly' at the Dees and they say he has had a profound impact on Kozzy. Both are Byron Pickett's nephew, while Latrelle is also part of the Sumner family tree. Football courses through his veins. He moved in with his cousin at the end of November and has been there ever since. The plan is to move out with his partner in the next few months, but the impact on each other has been noted by everyone inside the Demons, including new senior coach Steven King.

"I think Trelly is going to bring out the best of Kozzy as a young leader. I think they both bring out the best of one another, but for Kozzy to have Trelly there, you can't underestimate or understate how important that would be for him and the Pickett family," King told AFL.com.au in March, days out from Latrelle's debut.

You don't need to have a pair of eyes like recruiting greats Stephen Wells or Kinnear Beatson to see Latrelle's tricks. Everyone is mesmerised by them. But his dedication over summer, day-in, day-out, booked his spot against St Kilda in round one and has resulted in him playing all six games to start his AFL journey. "His consistency over pre-season for a first-year player has been quite extraordinary," King said.

Last year wasn't just defining for Latrelle, it was a landmark season for Kysaiah. Not only was he measured up for his maiden All-Australian blazer at the end of August, he also signed a mega seven-year extension through until the end of 2034 to stay at the Demons.

"Kozzy has had a huge impact on me," Latrelle says. "Like last year, watching him, he's inspiring to everyone, especially me. Coming into the club, he just made me feel so comfortable straight away. I live with him, like basically underneath his wing (with him) just telling me, do this, do that. So I'm just listening as we go."

It goes both ways. Those inside Melbourne have seen a shift in Kysaiah since Latrelle arrived. He speaks more in meetings, leads more on the track. They put that down to his younger cousin's infectious personality.

"I think so a little bit," Latrelle says. "He is himself a bit more around the club, a bit more loud. He didn't really talk much. I know they said a little bit of that is from me."

In the same year Pickett put pen to paper on a deal worth around $12 million, Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera became the first player to earn a contract worth $2 million per season when he re-signed with St Kilda for 2026 and 2027. Now the superstar Saint is, like everyone else, loving watching Trelly on the telly.

"With him and Kozzy, Melbourne's pretty fun to watch. You see them run and taking bounces on the wing," Wanganeen-Milera tells AFL.com.au. "Latrelle's going to be a special player. He's already got the speed and skills ... he's obviously still got a long way to go. But just know he's going to be special."

Wanganeen-Milera has been inspiring the next generation of First Nations players since he arrived at St Kilda. Now Pickett wants to follow in his footsteps and be like his cousin in showing Indigenous kids, especially those on the Eyre Peninsula where football is stitched into the fabric of life, that they can dare to dream.

"That's something I've always wanted to do," he says. "Obviously growing up, I've wanted to be one of them, just inspiring the next generation and all the communities. I've always had someone to look up to. I hope I'm doing that for the rest of the kids growing up."

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ESSENDON, Greater Western Sydney and North Melbourne were lurking on draft night. The Bombers selected Dyson Sharp with the pick after the Demons, at No.13. The Giants then picked Oskar Taylor – another Vivid Sport client – two picks later at No.15. Then the Kangaroos grabbed Lachy Dovaston at No.16. Fremantle picked Adam Sweid at No.25 after the Bombers chose not to match a bid for the Next Generation Academy graduate.

You can't control where and who picks you. But there is no doubt from Pickett that Melbourne was the best place for him to settle quickly and connect with a new club, alongside his cousin. "Yeah, definitely. It is the best thing. I couldn't imagine being anywhere else," he says.

"It's great how it has worked out," Munt adds. "I’m sure he would have got great support elsewhere, but we thought Melbourne would be a great place for him to succeed if it worked out that way, because he'd moved from Lincoln to Adelaide.

"We wanted to make sure there was a level of support that was there. And having Kozz there was so important to settle the kid in, because it's been such a big journey over the last 12 months."

This time last year, Pickett had just pulled up the anchor he dropped in Port Lincoln and was changing course in Adelaide. Now he is happily moored in Melbourne – and playing for Melbourne – following a life changing decision to move away from home and make the most of his gifts.