Henderson has taken an unlikely path to lead Ulstermen

THE skinny, shaggy-haired kid with the Belfast Royal Academy shorts and the knee injury sat on the wall as Ulster’s senior squad ran lengths of the pitch, unable to train thanks to an ill-timed patellar tendon issue.

Not sure what the story was with their latest Academy recruit, Rory Best certainly wouldn’t have believed then that he was looking at the man who just a little more than nine years later would succeed him as Ulster captain.

“Some judge of talent,” he would later joke.

Henderson, who was told of the captaincy by head coach Dan McFarland one day before joining up with Ireland’s World Cup camp, will lead out the side for the first time in his new role today in the Champions Cup clash at Bath.

He will do so having been the obvious and outstanding candidate to fill the considerable void left by Best after 15 years, a rare homegrown star possessing more than 50 Test caps and the experience of a Lions tour to New Zealand under his belt.

His route to this point hardly seemed pre-destined, however.

Born into a family steeped in Academy RFC — a pair of Henderson’s Ireland and Lions jerseys now hang on the walls of their clubhouse in north Belfast, where his entire family watched the Japan World Cup clash — his father Gordon had captained the club for the 198788 season when they were a senior side.

It was there that he played mini-rugby, his first run-out at Kingspan Stadium coming in the colours of Ben Madigan Prep at a primary school festival. The team picture that day, with Henderson a head taller than his classmates, shows that he always had the raw attributes and he would show promise in athletics too, most notably the discus.

Teachers recall a relaxed child with a head for numbers, the laid-back nature that would one day see Donncha

O’Callaghan christen him ‘The Llama’ evident even then.

Those who coached his earliest rugby noted, though, that he was a different person on the field, finding an aggression that was hitherto latent even if his brother’s arm still bears the scar of trying to sneak a piece of steak past his plate at one family dinner. Moving on to BRA, the alma mater of Grand Slam-winning captain Jack Kyle, his talent was unquestioned, although to describe him as a star of the future would be a stretch. Chris McCarey, coach of the BRA team that went all the way to the

Schools’ Cup final in 2010, said: “He never played any representative rugby or anything like that, for Ulster or Ireland.

“He had an injury that meant he didn’t play at all in Year 13 so he was probably off the radar a bit.

“He came back and we played a game against Ballyclare. He picked the ball up in our half and didn’t get tackled until he was in their ‘22’, it took that many of them to drag him down. I remember just looking at David Creighton, who was coaching with me, and it was sort of like, ‘We might have something special here’.”

And yet, having lost that Schools’ Cup final to Ballymena Academy, that was almost that. An offer to study actuarial studies at Heriot-Watt had been accepted. He wasn’t quite at the docks by the time Jonny Bell intervened with an offer of an Ulster Academy place, but not far off.

Despite the initial scepticism, he wasn’t long in making an impact.