Red Roses
If it’s tries you’re after, look no further than Bears and England hooker LARK ATKIN-DAVIES – and there’s more to come
LIKE SO many players, and not all of them English, Lark Atkin-Davies drew inspiration from watching Jonny win the World Cup for England all those years ago. She was eight years old at the time and it lit a fuse in her. But a deeper desire stemmed from much closer to home. “My dad played at university, across the front row,” she explains. “Whenever we had a ball to chuck about, it was always a rugby ball. It was always that thing that I did with him. In the garden, at the beach, he encouraged me to chuck a ball about and to do what I enjoy. And when I found rugby I absolutely loved it, so it was a no-brainer.”
Dad Matt was only part of the equation in their snug Shropshire cottage. Fern, one of her two older sisters, was a talented swimmer, good enough to compete for Great Britain at junior level, and Lark was in awe at her commitment. “She trained hours that I couldn’t even fathom. As a youngster, my parents went part-time with work and we were lucky enough to have grandparents that lived in Birmingham, so they’d get up at three, she’d swim four until six, they’d drive to work, drive her to school, which was an hour-and-a-bit away from Birmingham, and then she’d do the same in the evening: they’d leave at three, get there just after four, swim four till six, go home, have some food, get an early night. That was their life.
“My oldest sister, Holly, was able to look after me quite a lot but sometimes I did have to do those stints with them, and to see Fern training, the amount of work that she put in, gave me that fire in my belly. Like, if she was capable of doing that, achieve the grades she did at school whilst swimming at nearly the highest level that she could, then it was motivation to push me further. I’m very lucky to have two sisters that have shaped me in that.” The introduction of tag rugby at her Ludlow primary school “opened that door for me” and Atkin-Davies embarked on her amazing journey: age-grade rugby at Luctonians, Greyhound and Worcester, senior rugby for Worcester, Loughborough Lightning and Bristol Bears, international rugby for England U20 and England.
She has mostly played hooker in that time, a position that came naturally because no one else could throw the ball overhead like she could. Her first full-time Red Roses contract arrived in 2019, Atkin-Davies giving up her teaching career and making immediate gains in athletic performance.
She has scored tries by the dozen, too many for her to keep tabs on, although she’s fairly sure she was the Premiership’s top try-scorer for each of the last three seasons before this one. She scored 23 last season and in October became the first hooker to score four tries i
