Beth Wilcock

Taking a call from England Sevens head coach James Bailey while working through a severe hangover in Amsterdam kickstarted the best year of Beth Wilcock’s life. But when it all ended, she hit her lowest ebb. Stepping in to help her were a cast of four dogs, three brothers, two foster siblings, two parents, a parrot, a snake and a gecko.

“You thought I was joking when I said crazy house?!” laughs Beth Wilcock after giving us the full list of housemates at her family home in the New Forest. The breeds of dog cover half the competition categories at Crufts by the way: a cocker spaniel, dachshund, mini yorkie, and a Shih Tzu. There’s also a rabbit and a spider knocking around for good measure. 

Having been living in London as a fully paid-up member of the England Sevens team until March’s lockdown, Beth’s homeward migration was followed by the cancellation of the England Sevens programme as a cost cutting measure by the RFU – a decision which had been brought on by the cancellation of the 2019/2020 Sevens World Series and the postponement of the Olympics to July 2021.

“From it being the best year of my life to going through one of the worst points of my life when it was coming to an end, I was the lowest I had ever been,” she says. “What hit me was the reality that all my life, I’d wanted to be a sports person and everyone just nags at you and nags at you saying ‘you need a back-up plan, you can’t be a sportsperson, you’re a female so you can’t be one’. The reality that hit me was that ‘bloody hell you can’t rely on sport’.”

Since moving back home she has, at least, not wanted for distractions. “My middle brother Nathan started getting into pets, particularly reptiles, at the start of lockdown. First it was a spider, then mid-lockdown it was a snake, then I came back the other day and it was a gecko! I’ve told him that if any of them escape I am actually moving out.”

In exchange for putting up with Nathan’s new friends, Beth, who is nineteen, has been dragging him and younger brother Sam out for training sessions in her attempt to stay fit. But with football being the family sport, she’s had to seek her rugby fix elsewhere, namely Rugbytots, the rugby play programme for children, which Beth has started coaching. “The joy that that brings,” she exclaims. ”It’s one of the cutest, funniest, few hours of the weekend.”

Quite soon Beth might be able to work from home in coaching Rugbytots as her parents, Sher and Dave, took on two new foster children at the start of the year, aged one and two.

Having foster siblings around is nothing new for Beth. Growing up, she and her brothers were used to sharing the house with up to four foster siblings at any one time.

Unsurprisingly, Beth is a social animal herself. Lively and friendly, and with time for everyone. 

Rugby’s social side was one of the big attractions for her when she was deciding what sport to focus on at a senior level. “Until seventeen I played football and rugby,” she says. “I was a diehard football girl, absolutely loved it but I was coming off the pitch much happier after playing rugby. The football environment is really, really different. In rugby, coaches believe in you, and the players around you are so supportive. I was just a lot happier. My parents noticed it. Whereas football was slowly dragging me down, I was coming off the pitch in a mood and you didn’t really have that massive support network around you. I still love it, but I feel that it’s a very selfish sport. “Everyone was in it for themselves,” she continues. “For example, the relationship I had with the coaches was very on-off, parents would be making comments about players at the side of the pitch, who are just young girls of fifteen at the end of the day. Football is an individual sport within a team sport. You don’t have each other’s backs.

“In rugby, you could lose a game because of a relationship, something as simple as not getting on with someone on the pitch could lose you a game. Whereas in football if someone didn’t like someone, they can be like, ‘well I’m not passing to them’.”

Her comments are spookily prescient. Days later, footage of Real Madrid’s Karim Benzema instructing a team-mate not to pass to another team-mate because ‘he’s playing against us’ emerge from the half-time tunnel during a Champions League match. Real Madrid manager Zinedine Zidane’s reaction only serves to back-up Beth’s point when he tells the media afterwards "there is no problem between them - the opposite. Things like Benzema and Vinicius have always happened but they stay on the field.”

After making her decision to pursue rugby over football, she joined Harlequins to compete in the Premier 15s but it was her summer stint playing sevens for the Nomads invitational team where she caught the eye of England Women's Sevens head coach James Bailey.

“I was playing for Nomads and I was absolutely loving it,” she says. “I loved the game, I loved the environment, I loved the parties afterwards! We flew out to Amsterdam and on the Sunday after the tournament we must have got up at two or three in the afternoon, we went for breakfast where I got a call from James Bayles [Bailey]. I answered it and he asked, ‘what are you up to?’ I was like, ‘I’m just having breakfast….’ I think he was a bit shocked at that. I was probably still half drunk. Anyway, he said he’d seen the footage of Amsterdam and asked if I would like to train with England for a little bit and come out to the tournament Biarritz. 

“Within two weeks I was out getting my first cap in sevens in the south of France and playing against New Zealand. It was crazy. At that time I wasn’t even a contracted player. 

“When we got back from Biarritz they sat me down and said ‘we think you’ve got a lot of potential and we want to offer you a one-year contract’. It was an absolute dream.”

The best year of Beth Wilcock’s life was about to begin. 

But before she could get her teeth into World Series action, she spent a week training with England’s men. “I’d had a family holiday in the diary for ages so I missed out on selection for Glendale [the first leg of the women’s series] and had to stay in London training with the boys,” she explains. “They are really nice and sweet but some of them think they are genuinely hilarious, they find themselves so funny…when they’re not. It’s that typical boy rugby chat.

“I was nervous because I hadn’t met any of them. But you go in and train with them and they are all insane players so having that friendliness and being brought into it was really nice. But some of them think they are so funny!”

Without hesitation, Beth names Dan Norton as being most guilty of this mis-placed belief, although she’s quick to add that “he’s a lovely lad” and that he’s been more than happy to pass on his try-scoring expertise to her. 

“Dan’s the world’s best finisher in sevens and he’s sat opposite you in the canteen, so I was told to utilise that and he was so helpful.” 

Up to speed by the time the Dubai sevens came around in December of last year, her trip to the boomtown emirate didn’t go as planned, as she was hospitalised before taking the field. 

“The moment we landed I was not right. Dubai was mid-30 degrees and I was sat by the pool in compression leggings, a thermal top, and a jumper. 

“Then one night, I got rushed to hospital as they thought my appendix was going to burst. I’d never been that ill in my life, I lost 5kg within three or four days. We never got a precise diagnosis in the end, the only thing we think it could have been was food poisoning.

“Everyone raves about Dubai and it was really hard being out there to make my contracted debut and then I was just watching. I was able to fly to Cape Town [for the third leg of the series] but I was recovering slowly and wasn’t 100 per cent, so I wasn’t allowed the game time I was hoping for.”

Three tournaments (out of eight) in to the season and Beth had hardly featured. But her luck was about to improve at the Hamilton and Sydney legs in New Zealand and Australia.

“New Zealand was beautiful and getting on and playing was amazing, and in Sydney, the atmosphere was awesome. I hadn’t played a lot until that point but I felt like I was just coming into my own, I was enjoying the contact and I knew I was developing. I was looking to drive my attributes more into my game, like stepping in close contact. 

“As a team we were also on the right path to be ready for Hong Kong in March. We were really getting into our stride. Then Covid hit.

“After the best year of your life being a professional athlete – my dream since I was five – to then go into Covid, and to then have our funding cut, it was like taking the plug out of the machine. 

“That squad was the best bunch of team-mates I’ve ever had. I had a different relationship with every one of them but we all came together so well.”

Since the Premier 15s re-started, Beth has re-joined Harlequins and one of the bonuses of returning to her old club is that she can accurately assess how much her core skills have improved.  “You don’t notice how much you develop until you step away from an environment,” she admits. “I never knew I had a step before doing sevens. And when I left Quins my hands weren’t the best, but coming back I’m able to not just throw passes left, right and centre without thinking about it, but make decisions under pressure and fulfil any role on the pitch without thinking about the skillset required. In stepping back into an old environment, I’m finding out that I am a completely new player and that is really exciting.”

Whilst Quins is providing Beth with top-flight rugby, her heart’s desire is to pull on that England Sevens jersey once again. She’s convinced that when she does, she’ll have a whole new fire about her. “I love the girls at Quins and they have welcomed me with open arms but being back out on the pitch without the England girls is hard,” she says. “If we get to pull the kit back on I think there will be a lot more heart, which is strange to say because you play your heart out anyway when you play for England, but I think this whole situation is going to give us an extra bit. Knowing how shit it’s been without rugby, it’s going to make us dangerous. When the England shirt goes back on it will be exciting times. We’ve got an Olympics to look forward to.” 

Story by Jack Zorab

Pictures by Oli Hillyer-Riley