20 May 2024
For any professional rugby player, there will always be a point in your career when it’s time to hang up your boots, but exactly what you do afterwards is perhaps not as obvious.
After tenures with major local clubs, plus a stint representing his native Wales, Will Harries made the perhaps surprising move into personal finance, working for St Albans-based Lumin Wealth.
His involvement in rugby started when he was in Wales with junior clubs Cowbridge and Llandaff. This then progressed when he moved to Millfield School in Somerset, but it wasn’t until he started his degree that he realised he could make it professionally. After receiving an offer to study sports science from Loughborough University, he established links with nearby Northampton Saints, signing for their Senior Academy.
“I think in my third season I broke into the first team and played a couple of games but Northampton had a lot of money, so they were getting lots of players in making it difficult to secure consistent game time. When I was there, they signed Shaun Lamont, Chris Ashton and Ben Foden, who played in similar positions to me, so while I was doing well it was hard to break through, and I thought, I really need to start getting consistent game time now.
“Because I’m Welsh, my end goal was always to play for Wales, I thought I was good enough and from the Saints conditioning, my fitness level was high, so it was just a case getting a bit of game time and a bit of exposure.
“I started looking for other clubs and signed for the [Newport Gwent] Dragons, and literally within six months I was paying for Wales. It was a different culture and different environment at Dragons.”
But despite initial promise, it wasn’t all plain sailing from the start and enroute to international status . He soon found he wasn’t being picked, and partly through the season, was told there would not be a contract for him the following year.
“My first game for Dragons, I’d had food poisoning two days before, but you can’t have excuses in rugby. Even if they know you’re ill, you either don’t play, but if you decide to play, you’ve got to play well as there are no excuses.’
“So I didn’t play that well in my first game and I felt like that was their first impression of me.”
But all that was to change when he appeared in a LV Cup game against the Saracens in January 2010, scoring two tries and being named Man of the Match.
“They played me in a game against Saracens, when they were at the Watford ground, which was on Sky Sports. I was flying out to Vegas the next day for the [IRB] Sevens, so I was really fit, really sharp, because in Sevens you get to take people on all the time, in 15s you don’t as often. We weren’t expected to win that game so it was a huge bonus to play well and help the team win in a game like that. The following day I landed in Vegas and the Dragons team coach called me in the middle of the night and said there was a contract on the table for me as they really wanted me for the following season and that I would be starting against Ulster away the day after I landed back. He also added not to get injured in the meantime!
“So it literally went from nothing to everything.”
In May 2010 he was selected to join the Welsh national rugby union team standby list for the summer, joining the full squad after Shane Williams pulled out injured, and going on to make his international debut against New Zealand, who were a powerhouse to be reckoned with.
“Playing for your country is amazing, especially out in New Zealand when they were like out and out the best team in the world. They basically just didn’t lose back then. So yeah, it was a good place to go, and an amazing experience as well.
“The culture out there is quite similar to Wales really, where rugby is everything. People would stop you in the street and say, ‘Oh you’re here with the Welsh squad, you know you’ll lose don’t you?’ It always ends with that!”
After New Zealand, he made his first international start against Australia, but then injury struck: “Just before the World Cup I did my ACL [anterior cruciate ligament] in my knee, so I was out for ages. That was the first major injury I’d ever had.
“When I came back I got back into the Dragons team and was picked for Wales against the Barbarians, which was a capped game. We played at the then-Millennium Stadium, now the Principality.
“I think I got 20 minutes, I didn’t really have much to do, but playing in that stadium is amazing anyway, I think it holds 75,000 when it’s full.”
It was to be his final game with the national team, and at the end of the 2013-14 season he finished with the Dragons, and focused on Wales Sevens aiming to play in the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
“That was an amazing experience. The village was like a campus and you’d see Usain Bolt walking around.”
He then spent five seasons with Championship team Ealing Trailfinders, at which time he began to consider his options for when he eventually retired from professional rugby.
“That’s when I really thought it’s probably time to get a proper job because it’s not like golf, you can’t play rugby until you’re 60, you have to work afterwards.”
Will was fortunate to have come away from sport without any really serious injuries.
“I avoided people rather than go straight into people. I did have two bad ones, my knee and then I snapped my Achilles tendon, that was my worst one, and they had to reattach that. I’ll probably need a clean-up in my knee at some point, but other than that I’m okay.
“Being off injured does make you think and when I came back I was thinking, ‘Am I still as sharp now?’ So I moved up this way and signed for Ealing, who are in the Championship at the moment. My partner’s family lives around here, she got a job in London and while I was paying for Ealing that’s when I started studying finance.”
He had met some financial advisors while playing, and although he did consider coaching, he realised it would be a similar lifestyle to playing, so decided on a completely different career path.
“What really gave me the idea was when an advisor came in and spoke to the team when I was at Ealing, and said, ‘We think you guys would be good for the company when you finish playing rugby’.
“You get a lot of time off while you’re playing rugby, so I started studying, getting experience, going to meetings in London and that was when I made the decision.
“From the experience I gained through working with an IFA, I really enjoyed the role and realised I was quite good at it, and it was at that point I knew it was the perfect career for me.
“I think being a professional athlete provides you with certain skills for any job – maybe I specifically suited financial advice because of how my brain works – the attention to detail is huge because when you’re at that top level you can’t make mistakes, you have to prepare to take on a different team each week, there’s high pressure to perform, and it’s just being really organised and disciplined, so there are particular skills you develop to survive.”
Having completed a Level 4 Diploma in Regulated Financial Planning, Will joined Lumin in 2020, using his skills to help clients streamline their financial situation, creating an efficient financial plan that is specific to their objectives and situation.
