Hong Kong Rugby Player Juggles Sporting Life With Law Career

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/sports/rugby/08iht-rugby08.html

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WELLINGTON — It has been a whirlwind few weeks for Rowan Varty.

Since mid-May, he has represented Hong Kong at the London Sevens, where the team narrowly missed out on core status for the HSBC Sevens World Series, and has played for the famed Barbarians side.

At the end of this month, he will head the Hong Kong team at the Sevens World Cup in Moscow.

The hectic schedule is not out of the ordinary for a player who juggles his sporting life with his full-time career as a trainee lawyer.

But rubbing shoulders with the elite of world rugby is definitely not the norm, nor is becoming the first Hong Kong player to wear the black-and-white jersey of the Barbarians.

Varty’s teammates on the Barbarians included some of the best players in the world, like Joe Rokocoko of New Zealand, Sergio Parisse of Italy and Dimitri Yachvili of France.

“It was brilliant,” Varty said. “The guys I met were so on top of their game.

“They didn’t have to train that hard or have to work too hard to put a good team together,” he said. “Despite the results I still think it was a very good team.”

Varty came off the bench in the 40-12 defeat to England on May 26 at Twickenham — the home of English rugby; two weeks earlier he had played sevens for Hong Kong as it looked to become one of the 12 core teams on the World Sevens Series circuit.

He called his experience at Twickenham “very surreal,” since in 2008 he had watched a roommate play there for Yorkshire in the English County Championship final.

“I never thought that I’d play there,” he said. “It doesn’t actually feel like I’ve done it.”

Surprisingly, Varty, who plays wing or fullback in the 15-man game, was overlooked for the Barbarians’ game against the British and Irish Lions in Hong Kong last Saturday. The Lions won comfortably, 59-8, and the 27-year-old was clearly disappointed that he did not get to run in front of his home crowd.

He also believes that not playing him was an opportunity missed to push the profile of 15-man rugby in Hong Kong, where sevens rugby is king because of the tournament held annually in March.

“I think these big games’ coming to Hong Kong — like the Lions-Barbarians, like Saracens came last year and played against the Asia-Pacific Barbarians — they are huge for the country,” said Varty, who has played in 33 test matches for Hong Kong.

“But at the same time, involvement in the sport is the main thing, and there is a heck of a lot more local people involved in the sport now,” he said. “It’s a shame I couldn’t play because I think that might have helped things a little bit.”

Varty has not had much time to dwell on the disappointment. He returned to work Monday but left for Shanghai on Thursday with his Hong Kong sevens teammates for the All-China Games.

He will need to take more time off from his day job for the Sevens World Cup in Moscow the weekend of June 28, which will be his third World Cup tournament.

Varty, who won a silver medal with the sevens team at the Asian Games two years ago, said his employer, the law firm Tanner De Witt, was understanding.

“I think some of the other guys have a hard time getting time off,” he said. “One of the guys is a teacher, and it’s quite hard for a teacher to just not show up at work.”

But thanks to rugby’s being admitted to the Olympic Sports Institution of Hong Kong — following the International Olympic Committee’s decision to have sevens on the Olympic program from Rio de Janeiro in 2016 — Varty and his teammates now have the option of becoming full-time athletes, although Varty has yet to decide whether he will take up the offer. In all, 12 men and 13 or 14 women will be offered full-time contracts.

Varty said that for Hong Kong to improve on the international stage, players needed to be available full time.

Some players are taking unpaid leave to play in tournaments, and all of them train at least 15 hours a week, starting at 7 a.m. so they can be at work by 9 a.m. They will then have specific rugby training sessions at 7 p.m. several nights a week as well.

“Our biggest constraints are time and number of players,” Varty explained. “We’ve really pushed the limits with it. All of our guys are doing the most they possibly can in the gym and with their personal skills.

The Olympics has been a catalyst for countries to pour money into the sport and develop the game in regions not traditionally associated with rugby.

The World Cup will give the Hong Kong players a taste of what to expect, and Dai Rees, the head of performance and coaching for the Hong Rugby Football Union, has set a target of finishing as the top Asian team in Moscow. Japan and the Philippines are the other Asian sides in the 24-team tournament.

If they do finish first, Hong Kong will be able to send an under-18 team to the Youth Olympics next June, which will be the first event under the Olympics umbrella for sevens rugby.

Varty is not daunted by the prospect. “We think of ourselves as the best sevens team in Asia,” he said. “Japan will think otherwise.”

He added: “We think we play the best brand of sevens and we execute it the best. We think we should be finishing as the top Asian side anyway.”

Whether that happens will depend on how each team fares in its pool and if the teams progress to the Bowl, Plate or main Cup draw in the knockout stages.

Hong Kong has drawn England, Argentina and Portugal.

Japan is in a pool with South Africa, Scotland and Russia, while the Philippines faces Samoa, Kenya and Zimbabwe in pool play.

“Unless we get a one-on-one showdown with Japan in a quarterfinal, it won’t be directly in our hands, but we will do the best we can,” Varty said.

“I would personally like to win some silverware,” he said. “The team would like to win some silverware. There are three different competitions, which gives us a good chance.”