Meet Your 2025/26 Men*s Captain, Jack Hamilton

Last week, the last of the wider women*s student committee was elected and the Student Executive Committees for both sections were complete. Now that they have their leadership in place (and, more importantly, people they can delegate to), I invited the newest Blues Captains to sit down and talk through their rugby journeys. My meeting with Jack “Hammo” Hamilton (#1302) can be found below. Please meet Women*s Captain, Chloe-Marie Hawley (#384), here. 

First club, Newcastle Wanderers

Hammo is kind enough to come to the OURFC offices to meet me. I’m a few minutes late and he’s found his way into Head Coach Ian Kench’s office already, the two of them muttering about strategy before I interrupt. We settle in with a cup of tea and I start my spiel, telling him what I’m looking for, and that of course I won’t write about anything he’d rather I didn’t. I’m quite pleased with my first question “What is your first rugby memory?” and we get stuck in there as he thinks about it for a minute then laughs. “I’m not sure if I want this story out there”, he says, and as soon as he starts talking, I know I’ll be breaking my promise about privacy. Hammo’s first season was Year 3 at school in Australia, when he was nine years old. He’d always played “soccer” before that, but his best mate had played a decent amount of “footie” with his older brothers, and his mum eventually persuaded Jack’s that it would be fun for them to play together. He tells me that his first real memory of rugby is in fact a very anxious one: preparing to step onto the pitch for his first game – which always started by walking to the halfway line to shake hands with the opposition – but being too nervous to do it alone and asking his dad to walk out with him. I admire this as an intimidation tactic: both remedying his own worry and projecting it onto the other team by having his father looming large behind him, arms crossed, as he shakes hands with his opposition. 

Rather than playing at school, Hammo grew up through the club rugby system, joining Newcastle Wanderers for that first anxious U9 season and playing there through until he was 18, only missing one season with an ACL injury. Towards the end of this, he was picked for a representative side – the Hunter Wildfires – across the various clubs in Newcastle and played with them from the ages of 15-18, including tours to New Zealand and the UK. It was there he was coached by ex-Wallaby scrum half, Steve Merrick, who he admires as the most influential person in his rugby journey. Despite the obvious physical setback of an ACL tear, the injurywas perhaps a blessing in disguise as he “spent the next twelve months watching the most rugby I’ve ever watched”. The long-term injury gave him the chance to get into watching pro and semi-pro rugby, as well as analysing all the games his own team played. He learned a genuine strategic appreciation for the game in a way that he hadn’t previously, with his head down and focused on what was directly in front of him in the number 9 shirt. He says this was the time he “majorly developed my tactical understanding of the game in a way I never could have on the field”, working on his “rugby IQ” and growing the understanding and game management that is now central to his playing style. 

Playing for Hunter Wildfires

We then move on to talking about how he first got involved with OURFC and I’m immediately informed that Sydney University FC was in fact founded in 1863, six years before the Dark Blues. Just like OURFC, SUFC pride themselves on history and tradition, operating under the slogan: “the birthplace of Australian rugby”. Hammo was coming through the Colts when Tom Osborne (#1276), who went on to captain the Blues in 2023, was moving from Sydney to Oxford and he remembers the club’s pride about the move. 2014 Captain, Jacob Taylor (#1187), and 2009 Captain, Nick Haydon (#1141), are also SU graduates, making the last four Australian captains SUFC alumni. The history between OURFC and the wider Australian rugby world is also strong, with 2007 Captain, Joe Roff (#1111), going on to become the President of Rugby Australia and 2001 Captain, Brett Robinson (#1052) currently holding the post of Chair of World Rugby. Hammo is looking to strengthen this connection in the upcoming season, taking the team over to Aus for the first time in thirty years and complementing the Lions tour this summer. Anyone wanting to get involved with the tour would be gratefully received by Jack at jack.hamilton@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.

Aldi King (#1245), older brother of Archie (#1303), was also involved in the coaching at SUFC and would often wear Dark Blue to training. Hammo tells me about his first conversation with Aldi, approaching him to chat about the crown on his chest and how this interest in Oxford translated to the academic at a supervisor’s neurophysiology lecture, which included pictures of him working on his postdoc in Oxford in the eighties. Acknowledging Oxford as one of the great universities of the world, Hammo thought that it would be a great next step for his performance both on the field and in the lab. 

The yellow and blue of Sydney U

After hearing about the similar values between SUFC and OURFC, I ask him what sets Oxford apart from other places he’s played and hear that all teams are unique. The defining feature for Oxford, however, is that everyone is first and foremost a student. All the players have their own busy study and life schedules, carving out time and energy for love of the sport and team. Hammo tells me how cycling through the gates and down the hill, past the pavilion and the pitch, is a physical and symbolic gear shift from academic pressures to rugby with friends. I nod along and think to myself I might finally need to get a bike after four years in Oxford purely so I can enjoy this dramatic entrance. He adds that having a physical home in Oxford at Iffley Road makes a huge difference. It can be easy to take for granted but he’s conscious of how lucky the team are when you take the time to appreciate constant access to the pitch and gym, as well as use of the historic pavilion for socials which allows everyone to get involved. “You couldn’t draw it any better” he says of the site: the pavilion sitting above the pitch, surrounded by historic stands as well as the changing and medical rooms and offices, with trees standing guard all around. 

After such a glowing recommendation of OURFC (I couldn’t have scripted it better and start grinning as I’m taking notes), I decide to cut to the chase and ask what the single most important thing about the club and his captaincy is to Hammo. He continues to give flawless answers (and I start thinking about Hamilton Media Training as a prerequisite for players) with the reply “legacy”. Talking to alumni is incredibly revealing; they remember these as some of the best years of their lives, and it’s easy to see how this experience will become a defining moment for many in hindsight. One of the points he made in his husting (an election bid) was that history is all around you at OURFC and taking the time to engage with it can enrich your experience. We spoke in the Ricoh Room under the West Stand, with trophies on the walls, and he had given this husting speech in the gallery room of the pavilion, lined with faces of the past. A clear priority is making sure that his team appreciate and understand the lived and living history that they inherit and embody. The thread which runs through everything is the idea to always “leave the jersey in a better place than you found it”. 

Hammo with the European General Manager of RM Williams, with whom he worked previously and current sponsor of the Varsity Matches

Absolutely central to this history is the Varsity Match, which sits at the heart of OURFC’s heritage. The phrase “varsity” was first coined in the seventeenth century as slang for “university”, similar to the modern use of “uni”. In the nineteenth century, it came to be used to refer to sport, with the phrase “Varsity Match” appearing a few years before the first rugby Varsity Match in 1872. Hammo talks about the VM in terms I hadn’t considered - we’ll come onto the cliches shortly – as he begins by talking about how very odd it is to know that your place in the grand final is secure before the season begins. In any other competition structure, you work your way up week by week, game by game, however at OURFC and CURUFC, you arrive in September and know you have five months to prepare for an event which sits in the World Rugby Hall of Fame. The entire season revolves around one fixture, with the question “will this help us win the Varsity?” applied to training, selection, fixtures, and every other club decision. There’s truly nowhere to hide with the challenge and date set so far in advance and here, we move onto aphorisms, with Hammo educating me about the Aussie phrase: “the Melbourne Cup’s not run in January”. The famous horse race happens every first Tuesday of November, and this saying is used to advise patience: you have the season to prepare yourself and your team to be ready for this match, not a day earlier, not a day later. 

Finally, I’d like to leave with you with a Jack Hamilton Fact File – for all those alumni who I hope will introduce themselves to help him along his journey, these are the essentials: 

College: Lincoln 

Course: 3rd year DPhil in Physiology, Anatomy, and Genetics, working in a sleep physiology lab on the link between sleep and mental health 

OURFC Matches: 18 

Tours: USA (2024), Georgia (2025 – concussion in final Michaelmas match made him into a social member, fortunately or unfortunately...) 

Blues: 2024, 2025