Before he’d even turned 30, with no Premiership playing experience to his name, Tom Harrison was charged with giving Dan Cole and the Leicester forwards help with their scrummaging. Just two seasons later, he is coaching England at a Rugby World Cup.

On the grounds of the former Mohawk Institute, where colonists would force Indigenous youth to speak another language, change their clothes, shave their hair and suffer unimaginable cruelties, many ending in death, a truly remarkable rugby session took place. 

Almost seven years after being brutally cut from the women’s top tier, Lichfield are back in the top flight, helping to power an icon of English rugby as Leicester Tigers make their Premiership Women’s Rugby debut.

Jutting out from the southernmost tip of Spain, the unreservedly British Gibraltar shares many things with its mother land, not least a passion for rugby. Their ground would be the envy of international sides, if only they got to showcase it on the global scene. Instead, they find themselves in rugby’s no-man’s land.

After nipping at the heels of the men’s Premiership to no avail, it’s in the women’s game that Ealing will finally get to taste top-flight rugby. Gaining entry before they’d even played a single game of rugby, Trailfinders Women could prove to be the making of the west London club.

For almost a year, the future of Worcester Warriors, a club that had risen up through rugby’s pyramid, hung in the balance. Fans, players, office staff and coaches could do little more than watch as the incredible rugby legacy of Cecil Duckworth was torn apart.

At Oldham’s Boundary Park, a ground where fame once flickered at the dawning of football’s Premiership era, one of league-union’s great crossover coaches, Mike Ford, is attempting his finest feat: reviving the fortunes of his home-town club.

Rosslyn Park had been blessed by Russian royalty, part of a much-vaunted history, but the advent of professionalism led to a plummet down the leagues. It was only saved when a stranger with a familiar surname walked through the clubhouse door offering a route to salvation.

Four times a year, one church in the Welsh valleys is packed to the rafters, standing room only, both young and old. Tongans have made a big impact on more than just rugby in Wales and, if you ask the Tuipulotus, the feeling is mutual.

The story of Bridgend-born Meg Webb, who plays for Brython Thunder, Bristol Bears and Wales, also features in the new issue of Rugby Journal. Available to buy here.

On the last day of training, three days before she gave birth, Abbie Ward was squatting over 100kgs, reeling off deadlifts, bench pressing and rowing. Less than three weeks, a C-section and a baby girl later, and the Bristol Bear forward is back at work.

Saved from extinction for the cost of ‘one hundred trips to Paris’, Cambridge leapt from third to first on the final day of the season to secure what seemed an unlikely promotion to the Championship. It’s a story that even their former chair Jeffrey Archer couldn’t make up.

It’s seen the highs of visiting All Blacks and a dominant Pooler, and the lows of arson and financial collapse. But now, after a decade of turmoil, Pontypool Park will once again play host to top-flight Welsh club rugby.

When Italy’s under-19s visited Argentina more than two decades ago, they gave fifty minutes of game time to a local teenager called Sergio Parisse, who happened to have Italian parents. Fate would then set him on a path to become the greatest Italian player of his generation.

In 1987, Yorkshire won the county championship with a side flush with British Lion-class talent from Rob Andrew and Peter Winterbottom to Rory Underwood. Today, while the talent remains, the White Rose is still to truly bloom in rugby’s top division.

Rocky Clark wasn’t always on the right path. A ‘fat knacker’ in danger of being arrested was instead ‘guilted’ onto a rugby path paved with 137 caps and a World Cup win.

When a fifty-year-old Topsham printer went to Exeter to try and get a game of rugby, he was told he was too old for them. Undeterred, he opted to set up his own club, in a town known for building warships, fishing, and having an awful lot of pubs.

Before they conquered all, Wasps Women worked shifts in the club kitchen just to validate their existence. For forty years they’ve been the great entertainers of the women’s game, until they weren’t. When the men’s side imploded, the impact reverberated from Coventry down the M40, with the women’s team forced to leave the division they once dominated.

In Estonia, just south of Finland, next door to Russia, Rugby World Cup winner Graham Smith ponders thirty years of coaching. For a slaughterman who almost had to literally fight off the bailiffs, the Black Country boy has done well.

Glued to the television, a twelve-year-old Alex Goode didn’t miss a point as he watched Britain capture their first-ever badminton medal at the Olympics. He’d found his sporting hero, who just happened to also be his Aunty Jo.