‘People talk about the five stages of grief… I went through most of those’: Ex-Premiership star reveals what happened after the rugby stopped
Will Edwards on the charge for Harlequins.
The last time Harlequins played Newcastle in English rugby’s top flight Will Edwards was man of the match. This time he is not even in the sport.
Nine months after steering Quins to the top of the Gallagher Premiership the fly-half will be at home with his baby daughter as Marcus Smith wears the 10 shirt at Twickenham Stoop.
When Planet Rugby caught up with Edwards in April the former England sevens star had just switched to ‘survival mode’ after learning he would not be offered a new contract.
Since then 185 players have left Premiership clubs, 70 with no job to go into. As of the start of this month, 37 were still without rugby employment.
A lucky one
Edwards now considers himself one of the lucky ones. Three weeks ago he started a new career in the world of quantity surveying, the first to join the Athlete Transition Programme offered by City-based Business Critical Solutions.
But this is the story of those long, lonely months between winning a match on a wet Friday night in Newcastle and swapping rugby for Civvy Street.
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The anxiety and dread of life beyond the touchline, the fear of the unknown and how to support his family when all he had known was being taken away from him.
“I’m not going to lie,” says Edwards. “There were a lot of times I’d put my head on the pillow and not fall asleep for two or three hours through worry; trying to figure out what best to do and how I was going to make it work.”
Quins did not confirm his departure publicly until the day before their final game of the season, a heavy home loss to Bristol which left them out of the play-offs for the first time since 2020.
“People talk about the five stages of grief and I guess I went through most of those. There were definitely a few days I’d go in angry. There were definitely a few days I’d go in depressed.
“By the time of my last involvement with Quins, the acceptance had kind of kicked in but the difficulty with the acceptance piece was I still didn’t actually know what I was going to do when that final day came.
“I’d accepted what was happening with Quins, that a new chapter in my life was starting. But what that new chapter was sent a rollercoaster of emotions through my head.
“I needed to sort my life out, everything was completely up in the air. As a family, we were spinning multiple plates all at once and I didn’t know how long we could continue doing that for.”
Edwards says teammates and staff at Quins were understanding.
“But it still came down to the fact that the last game of the season I got given a shirt and that was pretty much the last contact I had with 90 per cent of them.
“That is the reality of professional sport. Everyone leaves for their five-week off-season. By the time pre-season comes around there’s new players in and the past is the past.”
On his own
The 28-year-old was now on his own, feeling the same insecurity that hit players from Worcester, Wasps and London Irish when those clubs folded without warning during the 2022/23 season, forcing hundreds onto rugby’s already over-saturated job market.
As the days turned into weeks the phone finally started to ring. The Chicago Hounds offered him the chance to play in America’s MLR. Likewise, US Carcassonne in the Nationale, the third tier of French rugby.
He weighed up those options, as he did a late call from Leicester Tigers well into pre-season. By then, however, he had reached the conclusion there was a lot of life still to live and he had a responsibility to his wife and daughter to find a job guaranteeing more than two years’ employment.
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Which is where BCS came in, a forward-thinking company recognising that even the most highly qualified staff don’t necessarily possess the soft skills that come with 10 years in a professional team environment.
Edwards was hired to plug that gap and, even though he has been out of Quins for only a short time, already feels able to reassure others going through the same stomach-churning process that there is life beyond rugby.
“Everyone in the rugby bubble thinks that is the be-all and end-all, I know I did,” he says. “But this experience has shown me the fear of transition is a lot worse than the actual transition.
“There’s a lot you worry about leaving professional sport; how your body is going to react, how your mind is going to react. The biggest bit is changing careers and basically going in as a newbie again.
“The twist I ended up putting on it, which helped me through, was actually being really excited to use other skills that I haven’t really utilised for 10 years or so.
“Rugby was amazing and the best thing I could have wished for coming out of school. I made great memories and friends who I will always greet with a hug.
“It’s been a huge part of my life and I still want to be involved in some way because I know there will be a scratch I need to itch. But that now will come in the form of coaching.
“I played for eight years professionally and I look back on that time very fondly. But that is a small proportion of an adult life. Hopefully, I have many more to come in my new career.”