For Bill the start in football, unlike that of the five years younger, Jock, was to be held up by The Great War. He had begun playing for local junior-side, Kirkcaldy United, in 1912, aged nineteen and continued to turn out for the club until 1915 by when he was working at the Rosyth Naval Dockyard before being called up. But on demobilisation and his return to his home-town he was rapidly picked up by the Stark's Park club, there becoming a part of a team alongside David Morris that in his second season finished third in the League, two years later, now also behind Alex James, was fourth with in-between the winning of a single cap. 

However, success would lead to pressure on club and player. Both Morris and James would in 1925 be transferred South to Preston North End and great things. Yet they would not be the first to go. Bill Collier had already moved on a year earlier, also to England but to Sheffield Wednesday, albeit without the same result. He would make only fourteen starts in a single season. In part it must have been because of his age. He was already in his thirties. It seems unlikely to have been because that same year he had married, back in Kirkcaldy, his wife-to-be Elizabeth Thomson, as the departure from Hillsborough did not prompt a return North.