MY LIFE IN RUGBY
Former Doncaster wing and now S&C coach Dougie Flockhart
THE Dumfries Primary 4 tournament, aged six or seven, was my first taste of rugby. Up until that point I was football through and through. After scoring 12 tries and being amazed that the aim of the game was to score over a massive line instead of into a goal, I settled on the idea that “rugby was easy”. How wrong was I!
From there, I progressed through the age grades right up to the first team where we played in National 5 West B in Scotland. Dumfries Saints is a great club with a fantastic junior section that I was lucky to be a part of. Dumfries at that time had invested in some Kiwi player-coaches who turned the club around, and we won the league unbeaten and scored 1,000 points which sent the club on an ascent up the leagues, winning promotion after promotion.
One of the players (Big Eck) took me along to a Scotland Rugby League trial. After getting selected, we played in the Student Home Nations and toured Europe. I remember playing a bizarre game against Wales where I scored five tries and we still lost! My performances for Scotland Students earned me a call up for GB Students and eventually four full caps for the national team.
When I went to Uni in Edinburgh, Ally Donaldson took a punt on me at Currie and invited me along to a trial game against Belfast Harlequins. Having seen something in me at training, he snubbed some more experienced players with better pedigree, something I’m very grateful for. Scoring a hat-trick, the game couldn’t have gone better and I quickly signed to play in the Scottish Premiership. This was also the first time I met Colin Quigley, who proceeded to follow me round for the rest of my playing career.
After a successful season, I was selected to play for Scotland in the U21 Six Nations. It was a very good campaign for us, beating a strong England side at Franklin’s Gardens. We later went on to the World Cup in Argentina where illness left me in isolation for two weeks. I watched us play Australia and Canada on TV but managed to return for the last couple of games of a very successful campaign.
A day after returning home, I was on my travels again – this time to Australia with Scotland to play in the Rugby League World Cup. It was a great experience and I was voted Scotland’s Player of the Tournament.
Back at Union with Currie, a great league and cup run culminated in an appearance in the Scottish Cup Final at Murrayfield. And, on the back of that, Steve Bates called me and offered me my first professional contract at the Border Reivers. I was over the moon at the thought of playing at the top level. Later, I received another call saying I had been selected for the tour to Canada with Scotland A to play in the Churchill Cup. Although I didn’t get game time due to a back-three littered with Scotland caps, the experience was amazing and we lost out to NZ Maori in the final.
Unfortunately, hamstring injuries kept me sidelined for months after that. My first real game for the Borders came in the European Cup against Biarritz. Twenty minutes off the bench running after Sireli Bobo was a baptism of fire but earned me a start in Italy the next week. After subsequent performances, I was offered a contract extension only to get the shocking news the Borders had been disbanded.
Having had the taste of playing against some of the top sides in Britain and Europe, I knew that professional rugby was all I wanted to do. Scotland now had only two professional clubs so I packed my bags and moved to play for Esher who had been building a great side to play in the second tier of English rugby. In my two seasons there, we played some amazing, expansive rugby. After scoring 18 tries in my second season, I fulfilled a boyhood dream of playing for the Barbarians. Two tries in the Remembrance Day game against the Combined Services put me on the radar of some of the top sides of the league.
It was then that I signed a two-year contract to play for Doncaster in the newly-formed 12-team Championship. Two seasons turned into 11 and I amassed 229 games and quite a few points after a chance opportunity led to me becoming the club’s frontline goalkicker. It was in my second season, away at Nottingham.
Knights’ now head coach Steve Boden was captain and elected to kick at goal when we were awarded a penalty. As our 10 had been yellow-carded, he turned to me to take on the kick. I’d never kicked before in my life so I was a little surprised! But I managed to get it over and that planted a seed in our coach Brett Davey’s head. After some hard work with him, and plenty of dedication for a couple of years, I managed to keep the job, becoming the club’s all-time leading points scorer and winning the Championship’s ‘Golden Boot’.
As a club, we enjoyed fantastic success over this time, none more so than when we ran Bristol right to the wire in the final of the Championship play-offs. A couple of months before I had gone through surgery to re-attach my bicep so was basically written off for the season. This was devastating as the club was playing amazing at the time and I was sitting 30 points clear in front of Gavin Henson in the league’s points charts. Thankfully, I made it back early for the final, and it was amazing to play in front of such a big crowd and kick the winning conversion down at their place. We lost on aggregate but that season we took them to the wire with a fantastic squad filled with great people.
For the last ten years at Doncaster I have done the unique job of combining my playing role with being the club’s head strength and conditioning coach. This has allowed me to work with some great people plus international and future international players at all stages of their career, from their first appearance through to, in some cases, their 200th. Since retiring earlier this year, I have taken up the S&C full-time. It’s great to see the club go full circle and we are now blessed with a new crop of hungry young players who I’ve enjoyed preparing for the new season after a challenging year. Winning our first four games, we have made a great start!
“We are blessed with a crop of hungry young players who I’ve enjoyed preparing”