Hartpury College

A farm in Gloucestershire has become the most prolific breeding ground for professional rugby players. Coupled with a Championship model that could be the blueprint for the future and complete with a meerkat garden and llama and emu orchard, Hartpury College has truly completed rugby education.

The residents of Hartpury College are certainly a mixed bunch. Across its  360-hectare patch of Gloucestershire’s finest countryside, it manages to squeeze in some 230 horses; seventy exotic and domestic species of animals – including an orchard of emus, llamas and goats and a walled garden with meerkats and prairie dogs – there’s a full working farm’s worth of animals, including a dairy herd and sheep; and some 3,500 students, of which some 700 could be playing rugby every week.

It’s come a long way for what was once a purely agricultural college when it launched with fifty male students [no girls allowed, at first] back in 1947.

And those playing rugby, aren’t just filling their timetable either. The numbers are impressive: six sides at male junior academy level [aged sixteen to eighteen], two female; six sides at male senior academy level [university level] and two female; coupled with league sides in the English Championship and the Allianz Premier 15s. There’s even a junior agricultural rugby side for good measure.

But it’s the silverware that stands out. Complete dominance in the AASE league, for elite under-18 colleges, has seen them win nine of the past eleven championships. And consistent performances in the BUCS Super League, have ensured they remain at the top of university rugby too, winning the Championship final play-off in three of its six seasons. 

The men’s ‘Saturday’ side took just ten years to reach National 1, having joined the league pyramid at the bottom in 2004, and then spent just two seasons in the third tier before a record-breaking unbeaten season took them into the second tier. 

And the female league side, although labelled Gloucester-Hartpury, is solely run by the Hartpury team, overseen by director of rugby, John Barnes. 

John spent ten years with Bristol, working with the likes of Paul Hull and John Brain in the academy, before joining Hartpury in 2010. “I joined to coach the BUCs side, but within about six months I was coaching the league side,” he explains, when we meet in his office, ahead of the Championship side’s friendly with Ospreys. “I still coach the Championship team, with Mark Cornwell [ex-Gloucester lock] as head coach and Rhys Oakley, the ex-Bristol and Welsh international. Wayne Thompson is the junior academy manager and coaches the under-18s with Tim Stevenson, then Dan Murphy runs the university programme, supported by Luke Eves, the ex-Bristol centre; Sean Lynn heads up Gloucester-Hartpury; Mo Hunt coaches the women’s university sides and James Forrester, he coached last year, but is now doing some marketing for the women.”

The coaching line-up is dizzying, especially when supplemented with ‘a lot of support coaches’; any number of teachers who also played professional and semi-professional rugby; and three full-time physios; three full-time s&cs; and the assorted staff it takes to run an £8.8m sporting complex which the students also have access to. Aside from basics such as five rugby pitches, including a rubber crumb and the Championship-standard pitch, there’s the newly kitted out £200,000 gym, a biomechanics labs, rehab suite, anti-gravity treadmill, altitude chamber and classrooms for analysis. “It’s not just the rugby here,” John reminds us, “rugby is the biggest one, equine is huge, and there’s also golf, athletics, netball and even football, they’ve entered the leagues and bounced up a few divisions.”

The operation is a seamless one. Students can arrive at sixteen, able to combine studies with rugby, and can then progress from A-levels to degrees, from junior to senior academy. And, for those not picked up by a Premiership academy, the Championship is the next challenge. “Everything is nearby,” says John. “The lectures are just up the hill from here [the sports academy], the farm is just up there [a couple of hundred metres from the pitch], the equine is nearby too, everything is close by, and it’s around 3,000 students which isn’t much compared to other universities such as Loughborough [20,000].

“We train early morning,” he continues, “the junior, senior and championship sides will be in on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 6.30am for analysis and physio, then out on the pitch at seven, and they’ve got the rest of the day for their lessons. The women are a bit different, they will train in the evenings.”

John was brought in by Malcolm Wharton, the former principal, to work under then director of rugby Alan Martinovic. And it was Wharton, who retired in 2012 after more than twenty years in the role, that helped reshape Hartpury into the college/university it is today, not only at the top of the student rugby world, but also equestrian and agriculture. “Before he came, the colours were green and yellow, very much agricultural,” explains John, “but his vision was to make it into this sporting institution and he secured the funding to put everything in place and make it what it is today. He left eight years ago, but Russell Marchant who took his place, also came from a rugby background, and he continued the investment in sport. Hopefully the new one – Marchant has just left – will do the same.”

The list of players that have been through Hartpury en route to professional rugby is staggering, with one recent study putting them as level best in the world with South Africa’s Grey College, both having 38 former students as current professionals. “In my first year with the under-18s team,” recalls John, “in 2010 I think, we had Billy Burns [Ireland], Callum Braley [Italy], Merab Sharikadze [Georgia], Jonny Hill, Ellis Genge, Lewis Ludlow [all England], Ross Moriarty [Wales] – all internationals now. That pack was amazing.

“Everyone sees the superstars,” continues John, “the likes of Louis Rees-Zammit and Ellis, but I don’t think we play a game in the Championship when there isn’t a Hartpury guy playing against us and I think every Premiership team last season had at least one player that had been to Hartpury.”

Even with such a glittering cast of alumni, some stand out more than others. “Mat Protheroe by a country mile,” says John, “he was phenomenal, in National 1 as a seventeen-year-old, he tore it up, I remember Ed Griffiths at Saracens wanting to sign him, Bristol did in the end – a phenomenal talent, one of the best.

“Harry Randall was another. Him and Mat were part of the team that won thirty from thirty in National 1, so was Ben Vellacott [Scotland scrum-half], Jake Polledri [Italy], and we had this phenomenal Lithuanian winger who scored fifty-odd tries that year. He signed for Harlequins, but did his ACL and never played again.”

When Hartpury reached the Championship, they had almost exceeded expectations. “When we got there we did think, ‘is this too high a level for students?’,” admits John. “Up to then we had about sixty per cent students [in the squad], and a lot who had played for us, went to Gloucester, and came back. 

“We did wonder if it was too far,” he continues, “we couldn’t play a full squad of students at this level, but if we didn’t play students what would be the point? That’s what it’s about, not just getting in ex-students. 

“That first year, twelve first-year students made their debut, and that continues, we’ve got maybe fifteen students in the current squad, nine playing today [against Ospreys, who ironically now have Protheroe playing for them].

“There’s no finite number of players in the Championship squad because we have all the BUCs players, but there are about 25 additional contracted players on very little money in a squad that could be up to fifty.

“There’s no point having a Championship side with no students, that
defeats the object.”

The Hartpury model is one that makes sense and represents the least risk for those choosing to push for a professional life. “We have a dual pathway here, elite sport while gaining a degree,” explains John. “It’s also a big selling point for Hartpury, for the men to have a Championship side and the women to have a Premier15s side as well. 

“It means if you don’t get picked up by premiership club at eighteen, you’ve still got a semi-pro environment on your doorstep to see if you can make that next step.”

Not everyone in the Championship has always loved Hartpury especially, as John admits, when the side escaped relegation with the help of an influx of loan players. “They were win or bust games, and we weren’t the most popular,” he says. “What people didn’t mention was that only one of the players that came in hadn’t played for us early in that season.”

Now, the reduction in Championship funding has forced other sides to find strategic Premiership partners, with Harlequins joining with London Scottish, on top of more traditional partners such as Northampton and Bedford and Exeter Chiefs and Cornish Pirates. “The problem with the Championship is you’ve got twelve clubs that have probably all got different agendas,” says John. “Ealing clearly want to go up; Doncaster are teetering, do they want to go up or not, they perhaps aren’t financially ready, but they still applied last year; Pirates and Jersey want to build stadiums but haven’t got around to it; and then you’ve got a middle group of teams that are never going to get promoted.”

What would John do if he was in charge of the second tier? “I would do what they’re going to do and have a cup competition which combines Premiership and Championship teams, which they will in 2023/24.

“And I’d still like to see promotion and relegation, but they have to understand the financials; London Welsh were a big problem, it went pear-shaped, but they shouldn’t have gone up, they didn’t have everything in place.”

Wayne Thompson is on the touchline today, assisting the Championship side, but his daytime job of leading the junior academy means he’s responsible for selecting the players who get to step on the first rung of the Hartpury ladder. Some three hundred apply. “We run assessment days throughout the year, one in October half term, one in February. And then our main trial in April combining both. So essentially, we have three days to look at students,” he explains. 

With 150 to each assessment day, Wayne calls upon a team of thirty staff – former players, across all positions – to help as talent-spotting eyes and ears during the sessions. “It’s down to us to identify simple things,” he says. “The kids who come in and work hard and have got a good attitude, and then points of difference, whether it’s speed, physicality or an outstanding pass. 

“Rugby is a full-contact sport too so they can’t shy away from contact and making tackles,” he adds. “It’s the simple things really and then we back ourselves as coaches to teach them on the technical side of the game.”

Now in his tenth year at Hartpury, he believes the success has ensured an ever-growing stream of young players wanting to study there. But even when he’s chosen the players, other challenges off the pitch emerge. 

“The biggest challenge is that every kid comes to Hartpury with the ambition to be a pro rugby player,” he says. “And I think it works out on average, we’ll have six or seven students a year sign pro contracts, which is a lot for a school, but on the numbers we have, it’s only about three per cent.

“So, we have to manage expectations as well as giving the opportunity to the boys that are good enough to kick on. The hardest thing is parents putting students on a pedestal and not realising the environment they’re in – the parents aren’t here with the students, they don’t understand the peers their children have and where their child stands within that.” 

Hartpury, says Wayne, is also great for late developers. Whereas with a Premiership academy, players would be released back home, if a Hartpury player doesn’t get signed at eighteen, they’re still in a professional rugby environment and the shop window that comes with a second-tier side. 

And even if that doesn’t work out, as they’re studying, they could still take an alternative route into professional rugby. “We’ve got boys who are physios at Bristol, s&cs at Dragons,” says Wayne. “They thought they were going to be professional rugby players, but didn’t quite make it, so have used their degrees to be in an elite rugby environment.”

Alan Martinovic is synonymous with the success of Hartpury. Stepping down as director of rugby in 2016, he had spent seven years overseeing Hartpury RFC’s rise to the third tier, leaving before they made it to the Championship; enjoyed seven consecutive AASE titles and three BUSA wins. A rough guess suggests more than a hundred players from his time went on to professional rugby life. 

Originally leaving Hartpury to join Bristol, he’s now working as a rugby consultant, and regularly returns to his old stomping ground, as he’s done today.

His story is far from dull. During the Second World War, his Yugoslavian dad was put into forced labour camps near Vienna, but when the war came to an end, he was taken to the UK, to a farm in Devon. “He did better than most as he learnt the language,” explains Alan, “and he got work in a munitions factory in Exeter, where he met my mother.”

Alan’s was an unsettled childhood, without his mother who’d left when he was six months old; he was fostered for a time, and also found himself scraping for a living in a bedsit aged sixteen, battling through his A-levels and paying his way with part-time jobs in a pub and shop. 

Rugby was there for him, playing colts rugby for Exeter, and when he got to university in Birmingham, he went down the teaching route, largely so he could also fit in rugby coaching as part of any job. 

That, in turn, would lead him to Colston’s in 1986, a time when the Bristol school was far from any kind of force in schoolboy rugby. “I think the year before I arrived, they won one game all season,” says Alan, as we return to the topic of rugby, having been side-tracked by his fascinating past. “I remember the first coaching session I did with under-15s, we were given a sack of plastic balls, but the other coach tried to use a needle valve and burst every ball. So, first session, no balls.”

Slowly getting more involved in the rugby side of things, but not the first team, yet, he organised a tour to Australia and Fiji in 1991. “We had thirty kids, and it proved to be quite the marketing tool,” he says. “And in 1992/93 I took over running the first team, I just wanted it to be as good as it could be, and have a stab at the Daily Mail Cup.”

The way sides played at the time meant predictability was a problem. “If you watch virtually every team that played at every level in those days, it would be win the set piece, then it would go around the corner, around the corner, around the corner, and the ball never got to the winger.”

And so, Alan heeded the lessons of Brian Ashton, and looked to replicate rugby league’s ability to use the whole field, and not just one small corner. “I put a lot of emphasis on skill work,” says Alan. “A head of department once said to me, ‘when students sit down and do that exam, you want it to be the easiest thing they’ve ever done’ and I applied that to rugby.

“So, by making the training hard, making it intense, and taking it hopefully to a level which at times is beyond what they’re going to need, when they actually come to the games, it’s going to be easier.”

And for Alan’s Colston’s it became easy, almost too easy. “Local sides stopped playing us, and we had to go all over the British Isles to get games, and even go to international tournaments,” says Alan. “And that was the best thing that could’ve happened. Because we’d play the best South African, New Zealand and Australian sides and, sometimes, we’d lose too. 

“But it meant we were putting ourselves into some pretty intense battles in difficult places, and when it came to Daily Mail Cup games, no disrespect, but it was relatively easy by comparison.

“We won five Daily Mail Cups from 1995-1999, and then they changed the rules to stop us winning – you could only play three players who had joined in the six form – and we did one more year to make it six on the trot.

“But the heat around us was getting ridiculous, kids were getting abused at Twickenham because they were Colston’s, all sorts. People would make stuff up, saying I’d been in fights with other coaches, we were paying kids, they all had gold cards, free accommodation – you name it, they said it.”  

As a result, Alan decided to take a sabbatical and instead face international sides in Dubai and even Zimbabwe. “We decided to have another crack [at the Daily Mail Cup] in 2004,” he says. “We played Barnard Castle in the final, and I think we won about 48-0.”

Alan’s commitment to his rugby, while also deputy head of the school and teaching maths, meant he pushed himself too far. “I burnt myself out,” he says. “I had stress-related illness, and I had to take a break for six months.”

It first manifested itself in a panic attack, when coming back from a game. “I was just chatting over the back of a seat, and I suddenly felt like an electric shock had gone up my spine,” he says. “Then next thing, I thought my head was going to be crushed, I felt this pressure that was so intense, it felt like it would cave in. It lasted about thirty seconds.

“The next thing I know, my heart is going, and I’m thinking, I’m having
a heart attack.”

He wasn’t. He went to the hospital, had an ECG, and was in the cardiac ward for ten days before being released and told there was ‘nothing wrong’.

Later, a GP would tell him it was a panic attack, brought on by stress. “You never see it coming,” he says. “I felt like I had been hit by a train. I never thought it would happen to someone like me, which is a very arrogant way to be; I thought it was you know weaker, crazy people. You just don’t recognise the fact that you’re pushing yourself too far.

“It’s really, really difficult to deal with,” continues Alan. “In the sense that if you break your leg you know that, in probably ten to twelve weeks, you’re going be right again. But in this case, it was ‘when is this ever going to end?’ Then you think it’s an end but it’s not.”

The only way he moved on was to change his approach. “My instinct, as it always has been with stuff like that, is to fight it,” he says. “Which is the worst thing you can do. What’s the point of fighting something which is part of you? You have to accept it’s part of you. You have to accept it’s just your feelings. And then find a way of trying to cope with those. And over time you do so.”

Alan had met Malcolm Wharton at a schools committee. “Hartpury were getting the flack this time, instead of Colston’s, it made a nice change,” he laughs.  

Malcolm offered him a role, and with a fresh challenge exactly what Alan needed, he accepted and moved to Hartpury in 2009. The club side had begun to rise through the leagues and the university side was slowly becoming a force, but it was the launch of AASE the year Alan joined that would put it on the map. “I was brought in to run the junior programme,” says Alan. 

He began an era of utter dominance of this league, driven by his high standards. “I tried to raise the bar in terms of standards,” he says. “So, when they were training and practising, you’d be saying, ‘not good enough’, ‘not good enough’, ‘not good enough’, which all sounds very negative,” he admits. “Because a lot of it is about positive reinforcement these days, but you can’t just use positive reinforcement to drive standards. 

“Initially it’s difficult because you come across as, you know, maybe not that user-friendly and negative and all the rest of it. But once you’ve established those standards, you can step back, because the guys that have been there the year before, then drive everyone else, keeping the standards high.”

Hartpury winning year after year, also kept the pressure on the year groups that followed champions. “They don’t want to be the team that loses the AASE final,” says Alan. “So, all the guys worked their arses off to win this thing, they weren’t going to throw it away. Even less talented sides have won it through hard work, because keeping the run going was a big driver.”

Alan would take over the entire programme in 2012. “There were big components to the programme, the under-18s, BUCs, the Saturday team,” he says. “But they were all working in isolation, so we started to put them together and instead of three teams working autonomously, they were working as a symbiotic relationship, feeding each other.”

He overhauled recruitment too. “I started here in September, and I was told there was going to be a trial for the under-18s at lunchtime,” he recalls. “So over lunch period, which is about 45 minutes, there were two hundred kids.

“After about ten minutes I realised it was completely a waste of time,” he says. “I couldn’t see any value in this whatsoever. I mean, if they were lucky, they might get two minutes on the pitch, but there were so many kids you couldn’t see the wood for the trees.”

Instead, similar to the system Wayne runs today, he introduced earlier trials with eighty kids in each. And, he also honed what they were looking for, including ‘non-talent’ things such as work-rate, courage and resilience. Being exceptional, a 10/10 in one area, also helped. “There was one walk-up trial, when 200 showed up,” he recalls. “And out of that group there was Jonny Hill, who hadn’t applied, but at 6ft 7in, he stood out. He was very lazy, but he definitely had something. He’d be on the pitch, do something that made you go ‘wow’, and then you wouldn’t see him for ten minutes.

“I think if Jonny hadn’t come here,” reckons Alan, “he’d have been happy to sit on a tractor on a farm.

“Ellis [Genge],” continues Alan. “Literally, if the other team had had fourteen players sent off and there was one player left on their team, he would still want to run into him.

“One of the important things with somebody like Ellis, and I know it sounds a bit strange, is that he wants to know you care about him. If he knows that, he will actually take quite a lot from you,” explains Alan. “If you’re just confrontational with him, if he thinks you don’t care about him, you’re not going to get far.

“He did have this phenomenal energy on the field, which is what you see now, physically very strong, very quick for a big kid, and a relentless competitor.

“We played the Georgia national team in his last year here, and they were the toughest under-18 team I’ve ever come across. At the end, five players were in A&E, and they were all Georgian, it was brutal.

“Ellis is no flat-track bully, he’s not one that runs at you, but if you run at him, you never see him again. Those Georgian boys, they kept hitting him and Jonny, and they kept coming. They scored towards the end, and the game seemed to be gone, but Ellis was never having that. We got the kick off, scored and won the game. 

“Being led by Ellis, he’s not going to come at you with some great Churchillian speech or tactical insight – although he’s no doubt a lot better now – it was just, ‘we’re not going to lose this game. I’m not, you’re not’ – and that got us through some very difficult games.

“Resilience,” says Alan, paraphrasing Eddie Jones’ recent comments, “that’s what Eddie wants and in Ellis he’s got that, he exemplifies that warrior spirit.”

Whether it was Ellis, Jonny, Lewis [Ludlow], or any of the other hundreds of players who went through Hartpury during Alan’s time, and indeed no doubt through to John’s era today, they will have heard the same message. “It’s a journey here,” says Alan, “and there’s ups and downs, but if winning things is your destination, I used to say to players here, then what I want to see on that last page of your story, is one word, ‘champions’.”

And, as Alan concludes, showing that softer side of himself again, there couldn’t be a more beautiful place to write that story than at Hartpury. “The environment is fantastic,” he says. “We used to get here early in the mornings for training – just as they do now – and you see the sun coming up over this place and it’s spectacular.

“And this is really soft,” he says, concluding his story, “but in spring time, where that car park is now, used to be a field with sheep and new-born lambs. And every day, I used to stop and just watch them for five minutes – it always used to give me a lift.”

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Nick Dawe

This extract was taken from issue 19 of Rugby.
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