Tatyana Heard

After suffering a third ACL tear by the age of 24, Tatyana Heard lost her Red Roses contract and, with it, the job she’d always wanted. As the pandemic hit, instead of representing her country, she was getting up at 3am for another shift at the local Asda.

A slip of a town on the southern edge of the North York Moors, 45 minutes north of York, Kirkbymoorside has the most modest of achievements on its CV. Its brass band performs at the ‘top level of banding’, securing northern titles on four occasions; it was one of three key locations for Channel 5’s The Yorkshire Vet; and from around 1930 until the 1970s, it was building more than fifty per cent of British gliders. It’s also very easy on the eye, an English picture-postcard of thatched cottages, sundials, village stocks and castle ruins.

But, today, one truly world-class operator calls this 3,000-strong town home: England and Gloucester-Hartpury centre Tatyana Heard. It was when her parents split up in her early years that Tatyana moved from the USA to Kirkbymoorside, together with brother Ali and mum Tracy. “You’re five, you’re whisked away to a random country that you’ve only been on holiday to, and all these people are new and have weird accents,” says Tatyana of the move to Kirkbymoorside. “Growing up in Yorkshire, there was me and my brother, and then a boy across the street that was Filipino, and everyone else was white and from Yorkshire. There wasn’t much diversity around, but that was what I knew. 

“Being in that environment I knew I looked different, but I didn’t feel like I was different,” she adds. “My brother had some bad treatment, especially when we first moved over, there’s always certain idiots around; all the girls just wanted hair like mine, and that wasn’t a problem for me. Especially in small town environments, people don’t realise they’re being racist, they just think ‘you’re different to me’. It was great that I didn’t feel different, but when I moved to Hartpury and I saw there were loads of people like me, it was cool to acknowledge that I am, and I do have a different story to other people.

“If I’d grown up in a more diverse environment around more people that were black, or with more of my family members in America, I think my upbringing would’ve been very different. So, I think that’s definitely shaped me in a certain way, but I guess we’ll never know.”

Tatyana’s story is a rich one, even before she landed in the home of the British glider at such a tender age, she’d spent time in two countries. “My dad was in the US Army, my mum was a nanny, and they met in Germany,” she says, picking up the story. “They had my older brother, moved to Italy and then had me. We only lived there for two years and then moved to Maryland where my dad is from.

“My dad had two kids before he was with my mum,” she continues. “My mum was pregnant with my brother when their mum died, so they moved in with my parents in Germany. All of a sudden, she was looking after three kids. Then they moved to Italy, and I was born, so there were four of us.

“I remember quite a lot about America,” she continues, “silly things like when Santa Claus came and my parents left out orange peel around the house, we thought that he was just a really messy guy. We’d go camping and do massive RV trips, stuff like that.” Her dad still lives in the US, but Tatyana has been used to not having him around. “When it’s from so young, it just becomes the norm,” she says. “We spoke quite a lot for the first few years after we moved to Yorkshire, but I remember my dad came over when I was quite young, I think I was about seven, and me and my brother were like, ‘who’s that man?’. So, we didn’t even recognise him, and you didn’t have FaceTime back then, you just spoke on the phone. 

“We did have a fairly decent relationship when I was younger, we went over, and he took me to Disney World when I was eleven.”

Tatyana remained close with her two half-brothers who would come and visit them in the UK during the summer. One of them still lives in America, but her other brother tragically died when she was thirteen. “He was diabetic, and he just didn’t wake up from sleep one day,” she remembers. “He was living in his university halls at the time. He was notoriously always the best kid in the class, would wear a tie to class and things like that, and he didn’t show up to a meeting. So, they were thinking, ‘what’s gone wrong?’, and they went to his room and found he’d died.

“I think it’s just … it’s how life goes isn’t it?” she reflects with an air of acceptance. “It was a very upsetting time, but we’ve got our good memories.

“I’m a very logical person,” she surmises. “I’m not that emotionally driven in general life; if something’s happened to you it’s happened to you, there’s no need to shy away from it.”

However, the tragedy did make the relationship with her dad more difficult. “When my brother died, we went out for the funeral and saw all the family,” she says. “At that point we thought Dad would speak to us more because it was a hard time for the family, but I didn’t see him after that for eight years. He’ll wish me a happy birthday and we’ll speak sometimes, but that’s about it. Equally, sometimes I think it’s on me to reach out; I’m an adult, so if I wanted to speak to him more I could.”

Thankfully, Tatyana is very close with her mum and her brother, not to mention Kev, her stepdad. “He’s been massive in my upbringing. It’s funny, because people say that me and him are very similar. He’s really chilled, he’s quite an introvert, and I think those are the kind of traits that I’ve taken from him. I’ve got traits from my mum as well, but usually it’s always the ones I don’t want, like stubbornness. She’ll say to me, ‘oh, you’re so stubborn’, and I’m like, ‘yes, it’s genetic’.”

Tatyana’s parents knew very little about rugby, but after playing a tag tournament at school and going along to watch her brother play, she fancied getting involved herself, initially joining Malton & Norton RUFC, before later playing for West Park Leeds. 

After playing at county and divisional level, she was soon invited for a trial at Hartpury College and got accepted. “I didn’t really register what it was,” says Tatyana. “I’d applied for college at home too but realised that I could have this incredible life where I just trained all the time. I did fail my A-levels because I didn’t do my homework and just did fun things with my friends, so I changed to a BTEC and stayed for another year. That was the year that Meg Jones, Zoe Aldcroft, Sarah Bern all joined, and that’s where I got to know them.” 

Her first major setback came when she was just seventeen, tearing her ACL. This was to be the first of a trio of tears that plagued her early career. “I really struggled with that one, I had a lot of setbacks, it was just always stiff or swollen and was quite hard to get back from,” she explains. “The training you do at Hartpury is intense, and then when you’re doing it for rehab, not to have a kick around with your friends, it’s quite a shock to the system. You can’t do the fun stuff; you have to learn how to push yourself and get through those darker moments.”

Despite eighteen months out of the game, which included a missed chance to play for England U20s, she pushed on. “Like everyone else in college I wanted to play for England, but at the time it wasn’t full time. After Hartpury I went to do my undergrad at Cardiff Met, and my tutor asked me what I wanted to do when I graduated. I said, ‘I don’t really know, I want to be a rugby player’. She was like, ‘is rugby even professional?’, and I said, ‘no, but I want to be a rugby player’.” 

It was a different story, however, with her second ACL tear in 2016. “My knee started to lock; it wasn’t really painful at all at the time, but eventually it was locked for good, and I couldn’t move it. I saw the surgeon and he said, ‘We think it’s your meniscus, we’ll give it a tidy up and you’ll be out for three months, but I’ll send you for a scan just in case’. I came in the next day to see him, and he said, ‘Oh, sorry, you’ve got no ACL’. 

“I think after the second time I was like, ‘oh, if I ever do that again, I’m not playing’. Now, I think I’ve learned so much through all those injuries. It’s really benefited me in some ways, purely to get that mentality of knowing how to work hard alone. Mentally, it probably has set me back a little bit at times; if the body is feeling a bit stiff or sore, I can get nervous and I do worry about getting injured. I’m probably just a bit more boring now.”

Given the prevalence of the injury she’s so well acquainted with in women’s sport – studies suggest women tear the ACL between two and eight times more frequently than men – Tatyana feels that more can be done to investigate why. “It’s so common,” she says, “so many women find out they’ve done it and it’s heart-breaking, it’s such a long period out. It can ruin a career, so if you can even prevent five people from doing it, that’s massive.”

With fully professional rugby still not an option, in 2018 Tatyana started a master’s at the University of Gloucestershire to pursue a job in sport, but within a few months she had already been called up to win her first cap against the USA. 

A career midfielder, in the season she was called up she played two games for Gloucester-Hartpury at seven [as emergency back-row cover], but when the club’s first-choice twelve, Wales international Rebecca de Filippo was injured, she returned to her familiar spot. “I started at twelve, and then was called into camp. So yeah, it was a massive whirlwind.  A couple weeks later I was starting for England [at twelve] and that was a big shock. I played those first two games [versus USA and Ireland], had an unbelievable time, but then it wasn’t until 2019 when I got offered the contract that I was like, ‘okay, I have to really do this now’.”

With 24 caps to her name at the time of writing, Tatyana is now one of the most recognisable faces in the Red Roses squad, an ever-present in England’s midfield for the past two seasons and a back-to-back league champion with her club, Gloucester-Hartpury. However, for all the recent success, it’s easy to forget that if you roll the clock back just a few years,  Tatyana was contending with recovering from her third ACL tear by the age of 24, losing her Red Roses contract, and the small matter of a worldwide pandemic. 

“I was trying to rehab my ACL, but I didn’t have a job, and I didn’t have a plan because I’d quit my master’s at Gloucester Uni when I got my England contract,” Tatyana recalls. “So I was like, ‘what do I do from here?’”. 

After initially filling the gap with coaching gigs, when the pandemic hit those opportunities dried up, and with bills to pay she got a job at Asda. “I was doing home shopping at like 3am until 10am, then I’d go home, have a nap, get up, train, sleep, go back to work. It was a horrible, horrible cycle, but it allowed me to do my training. I did that for about three months, it was awful really.”

After three years away from the side – a 41-26 win against France in February 2019 had been her last appearance – she  was finally back on the pitch, but forcing her way back into England contention in time for the World Cup in 2022 was no easy task. After a strong performance in a warm-up against the USA, she was included in the wider squad, and then came her real opportunity – a start in England’s final pool game against South Africa. As the Red Roses ran in try after try, the then 27-year-old flaunted her trademark abrasive running, skilful ball-play and robust defence. Tatyana immediately looked as if she belonged, steering England to a 75-0 victory in a player-of-the-match performance. 

Starts in their quarter-final against Australia and their semi-final against Canada followed, before she was moved to the bench for the final against New Zealand with Holly Aitchison favoured at twelve. The result may have gone the wrong way for the Red Roses, the Black Ferns claiming a dramatic 34-31 victory, but for Tatyana things were finally moving in the right direction. 

In the first game of the 2023 Six Nations she started on the bench but found herself on the field within eighteen minutes after an early injury to Amber Reed. Eight minutes later, she was crossing the line for England’s bonus-point try. It was the perfect start to a campaign, one that saw her take the starting berth for the rest of the tournament, finishing with four tries to her name. To cap off the season, she played a central role as Gloucester-Hartpury lifted their first ever league title. Talk about comebacks.

As the new season fast approaches, with last season brining another  Six Nations grand slam and a second title with Gloucester-Hartpury, Tatyana has grown into an integral cog in England’s success. Not that she sees it that way. “I think everyone’s got that little voice in the back of their head, but I just always try to come back to the fact that I’ve worked really hard for it,” says Tatyana as we enjoy the sun overlooking the training pitches at the Lensbury. Unsurprisingly, she isn’t one to take things for granted. “I personally feel if I’m picked at the start of the week I never try and get that excited for it too early, because so much can happen in a week,” she continues. “Equally, I feel I put a lot of pressure on myself to be like, well, you need to make sure you actually deserve it now. My biggest insecurity … I wouldn’t call it an insecurity, but I guess it is, is that I don’t want my team-mates to think I shouldn’t be there.

“Going back quite a few years, when I was first contracted back in 2019, I knew I’d been performing well but I hadn’t put in the years of hard work, and didn’t have the knowledge that I have now,” she adds. “At the time, I didn’t feel like I deserved that opportunity, so then I wasn’t confident in my abilities. When I first started rugby, I’d only been playing for three weeks before I had a game for Yorkshire under-14s, and I was eleven. So, I’ve always been aware of the fact that if I was male, I wouldn’t have played at as high a level as quickly as I did, just because there were a lot less girls playing and thousands of young boys. I would think, ‘this is cool, but there’s no one else, and that’s why I’m picked, not because I’m really good’.”

Tatyana’s mindset, one of constantly looking to prove herself, partly comes from her innate competitive drive but is also the product of the treacherous road she’s had to take to get herself where she is today. “When I initially had my contract, I found it really tough mentally, purely because I didn’t think I deserved it – it had come around so quickly, I had it in my head that I was going to lose it the whole time. When I didn’t get it renewed, at first I was like, ‘it’s not fair, it’s because I’m injured, how was I supposed to prove myself if I’m injured?’ But then I realised, and it took me a long time to get to this point, well actually if I was good enough in the first place, they would have given me a contract and done anything to keep me. I had to work hard every week, it wasn’t just going to come.”

Slowly but surely, she’s starting to feel more settled. “I think I do have way more confidence now because of the experiences I’ve had. In a team like this, there’s always going to be someone that can flick that switch and do something to change that momentum back, so it’s a really confident place to be; they’re always going to have your back.”

For Tatyana, one of those team-mates in recent times has been Emily Scarratt, the Red Rose centurion used as an inside centre option under Mitchell. However, despite the former World Player of the Year’s positional change, it’s been Tatyana who’s held the berth at twelve. “Everybody knows Scaz is incredible; she’s got such a wise rugby head, I just try and learn so much from her,” she says. “It’s a really weird aspect that people are like, ‘oh, you’re competing for a shirt’, because it never really feels that way. We get on well, and if she’s starting or I’m starting, if one of us isn’t even in the squad, we’re quite respectful of each other. Against Ireland [88-10 win in the 2024 Six Nations], when Scaz came off the bench that was the moment where we started scoring all those tries.”

Still, Tatyana feels she has to prove herself. Has she had that moment where she feels like she’s earned her place? “No, never. I don’t think it will ever come. I’m always going to think, ‘could I have done more?’, that’s just how my brain works.”

Our conversation comes full circle back to [almost] home and the north-east as we look forward to the 2025 World Cup, now less than a year away, with Sunderland’s Stadium of Light due to host the opening game. For someone like Tatyana, who grew up and fell in love with rugby in this part of the world, it’s significant that rugby will be showcased on such a stage, particularly given the lack of a pathway in an area that has long been a conveyor belt of Red Rose talent. “Back when I was a kid, we didn’t have anything where I was,” says Tatyana. “Obviously DMP Sharks were a Prem side at the time, but I didn’t really know much about Prem rugby or women’s rugby in general, because we didn’t get to see that. When they came out the Prem, I was genuinely gutted even though I’ve never had anything to do with them as a team.

“When the game’s growing, you’d like to think everything’s growing, but especially in the north-east, there’s nowhere for people to go. West Park Leeds have done an incredible job, loads of us, Zoe [Aldcroft] and Ellie [Kildunne], all played there at one stage, they’ve got a really good Champ side, but people want to aspire to more. 

“Yorkshire just feels like home,” she adds. “When we’ve had games up in the north, when we went up to Doncaster or Newcastle, you just feel close to home, and I think that everyone should get to experience that. We go to Twickenham and that’s one of the best feelings in the world, but there’s other fans elsewhere.” 

If anything can be a catalyst for women’s rugby in the north-east, the World Cup opener will surely be it. “We have an expectation on ourselves around the World Cup, and we know what we want to achieve coming out of that,” says Tatyana, saying what everyone knows to be true without saying it – lifting the trophy can be the only outcome. This England side has achieved almost everything, a sextuple of Six Nations titles, including three back-to-back grand slams; the only point of criticism you can level is their failure to get over the line in the last two World Cup finals, losing to the Black Ferns in 2017 and 2022. 

“Mitch coming in, he’s made a lot of changes. I wouldn’t say that point has been an open conversation and being like ‘oh, why has this happened’, but he’s definitely put a lot of emphasis on the fact that we are going to be better going into this one,” she says. “That expectation on us players is driving our intent, and that is helping. A lot is being done in the background to make sure we stay on top of our game. And I think that’s what we need isn’t it? We can’t be getting complacent.”

Story by James Price

Pictures by  Oli Hillyer-Riley

This extract was taken from issue 27 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.