On Thursday 25 February as part of our Sports webinar series, Mr Sam Hewick, Director of Sport, interviewed rugby 7s Rio Olympian, Amy Wilson-Hardy. Passionate about playing at a high level, through her whole-hearted dedication and love of rugby, she has travelled the world. 

An academically able individual, while at school her love of sport included playing for a netball academy, as well as being a member of every sport club possible and playing club rugby. But, she said, her mother always encouraged her to prioritise work first and everything else second. 

Being a busy person, she learned at a young age how to juggle her commitments, including numerous A Levels. She would create a weekly plan and this has stood her in good stead since. Mr Hewick said: ‘Amy made it clear that if you are organised you can take part in high level sport and achieve well academically.’ 

Amy described how she fell in love with the game of rugby at the age of 11 when she was introduced to the sport by a friend at Worthing Rugby Club. She said she was a textbook RFU student playing at county, regional, and England Under 20s level.

Due to various injury setbacks, however, she then did not go straight to national senior level. But after a great deal of hard work, she won her place back in the England squad and was selected to play for the national rugby 7s and 15s teams in the summer of 2013. 

Professional rugby was not an option for women at that time and she went to Bath University to study Engineering. While there she continued to play on the national rugby 7s circuit. Rugby 7s was very much the development side of the women’s national rugby 15s at that time, owing to the fact that they were preparing for the Women’s World Cup in 2014. 

The following year, when rugby 7s became a priority, she was then selected for the national 7s squad. At that point, it was announced and women’s rugby 7s became professional in preparation for the Rio Olympics.

Going into her fifth year at university, she was offered and accepted a professional rugby contract. She was among the first group of women ever to be offered this opportunity.

She managed to do her final year of university away from Bath as she worked towards the Olympic games. She was fortunate enough to be selected and went to Rio in 2016. Frustratingly, they just fell short of a medal and came fourth. 

The following year, with the next Women’s World Cup on the horizon, she returned to national 15s playing. It was a new and amazing challenge, a helpful way to get through the disappointment of falling short of a medal at the Rio Olympics. 

Despite suffering injury setbacks, she made it to Ireland for the World Cup and was selected to play in the final with just two minutes to spare!

The following year, she was back into playing for the 7s rugby squad and the focus was on the Commonwealth Games where they won a Bronze medal and the 7s World Cup. She was fortunate enough to go to both, but then suffered the huge disappointment of being dropped from the 7s programme at the end of that year. 

Having been selected for all the 7s tournaments, this disappointment was more keenly felt. The reason: there had been a change of coach who never really backed her as much as the previous coach. As a result, she suddenly had nothing to fall back on in terms of income from rugby at that time. She still wanted to keep training to be a professional athlete because she was determined to be selected for the 7s squad, but in order to achieve this she could not do a 9 to 5 job. 

Thankfully, an opportunity arose to coach part-time for a charity, ‘School of Hard Knocks’, which she said was so much fun. The first course she ran was for a group of women aged between 18 and 60. None of them had played rugby before. It brought back the enjoyment of rugby again. At the same time, she went to play for Wasps with Giselle Mather, probably the most qualified women’s rugby coach in the world, and a fantastic group of girls.

In the end, she was only dropped from the national squad for two months. The same coach who had dropped her gave her the call and she was invited back into the 7s squad for the Tokyo Olympics. A month later she was on the aeroplane to Dubai for a tournament. 

Sadly, with the impact of COVID-19 and the first national lockdown the squad were furloughed, but they had the Olympics still in sight. Then, the devastating news came at the end of August/September 2020 that the national rugby 7s programme for the Olympics, men and women, had to be disbanded. 

A deeper resilience has been required since. This has included the men and women’s programme joining forces to create a new future…

Since the webinar took place, Amy has been named in the Rugby 7s Olympic squad and is hoping to be able to compete in the Summer.

Thank you, Amy, for coming to talk to us.