Meet Your 2025/26 Women*s Captain, Chloe-Marie Hawley

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 (and delegation) under control, I invited the newest Blues Captains to sit down and talk through their rugby journeys. Please meet Chloe-Marie Hawley (#384) below and get to know Men*s Captain, Jack “Hammo” Hamilton (#1302), here. 

I manage to pin down some of Chloe-Marie’s time when she’s on the move, bumping into players on the street as she chats to me while walking between supervisor meetings. This is typical of any student athlete schedule but particularly true of Oxford, where students claw back time for their interests between their academic commitments. We start at the beginning, as I ask about her first rugby experiences and how the sport became a part of her life. She tells me about growing up in Dubai and watching the England men’s team play on television with her dad, who was a big fan of Jonny Wilkinson. A recurring date in the calendar each year was the Dubai Sevens weekend, a huge event with her family and surrounded by a large community of friends who came from other rugby-loving nations: Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. 

After telling me about the excitement in the lead up to this event every year – and how prominently it features in her childhood memories - she stops herself so abruptly I can imagine that she’s stopped walking at the other end of the phone. “I really should have started here”, she says as she tells me about meeting famous internationals on the sidelines, including one particularly memorable occasion when she met Jonah Lomu at six or seven years old, and he threw her up in a lineout. As a result, rugby was central to the social fabric of her childhood, a community enjoying bonding over live sport. I always like asking women how they started playing rugby, as it tends to be a longer story than heading to a local club one afternoon when young, and it’s no different for Chloe-Marie. She talks about how as well as being around the sport consistently socially, the boys at school played fiercely from a young age. She soon picked up the ball to play touch herself, representing her high school in her final years, but never played contact at any of the local clubs that allowed it for girls (it was touch only at school). 

We then get to talking about how she found her way to playing contact at Oxford, detouring through her first introduction to the British academic system with Belgian GCSEs and eventual application to Oxford. She laughs at her naivety in hindsight, confessing it was a bit of a shock to arrive and learn about the intimidating historical and academic prestige of Oxford in 2019, having simply applied to what she’d been told was a good university. This initial (culture) shock was remedied by sport as she found a community in the friends she made playing basketball before making her way to a home with OURFC. Her first year of biology undergrad was of course derailed by the pandemic, but in Trinity of her second year, she competed in the Mixed Touch Rugby Cuppers Competition. The Women’s Head Coach and Captain at the time were there and approached to gauge her interest in contact and it turns out we can thank COVID for one thing as the Varsity Match had been moved to Leicester later that term and after a crash course in tackling, Chloe-Marie was selected as the 23rd playing member. 

This quick turnaround, combined with the fierce Cambridge side that year, meant that Chloe-Marie stayed on the bench and didn’t earn her first Blue until the next year, remembering it as a tough game but a brilliant experience. It’s not all bad though, as she played in the basketball Varsity in the same year and got her first Half-Blue under her belt. I ask if there was any turning back from there and hear about how this first taste of contact lit a fire for her to earn a spot in the team. Already aware of her habit of excellence (overachieving), I sneak in some questions about football and hear how she balanced playing Blues football, basketball, and rugby BUCS matches in her fourth and final year, improving her skills and eventually landing the starting winger position for the 2022 Varsity Match. Another year older, another year wiser, and in 2023 she brought football and rugby together with her kicking game to secure the starting #10 shirt, which she reclaimed this year. 

The 2022 Varsity experience was a real step up: the match taking place at Twickenham, a year of training with and committing to the team, personal improvement and a starting position, and understanding the history. The game itself was tough, ending with a draw which she tells me ultimately felt like a loss since the Tabs nicked off back to Grange Road with the trophy. This time, her parents were able to fly over to watch which confirmed the role of rugby as familial – a form of creating a new family in the team and of connecting with the one at home. The Varsity experience is incredibly unique, and this sense of family absolutely comes through in the process – particularly in the traditions the night before. Unfortunately, dear reader, you’ll need to earn a Blues shirt to see the inner workings of a Varsity eve but rest assured that emotion abounds. Like many players now, our parents’ generation grew up aware of the prestige of the Varsity Match and Chloe-Marie had a similar experience to me: telling her father she’d been selected only to hear in return everything he knew about all the Varsities he remembered from his youth. This second Varsity was actually the first time Chloe-Marie had played a full 80-minute match – her basketballer tendencies lending themselves to substitutions earlier in the season. She remembers waking up the next morning so shattered she couldn’t get out of bed, lying back and thinking “well that makes sense” (there was no comment about how the post-match celebrations may have contributed). That summer, she continued to work on her skills, selected by the Dubai Phoenix Sevens team and working to hone her skills in an intense preseason. The conflicting Varsity experience had left her hungry for revenge and she was keen to give the next campaign everything she could.

Finally, in 2023, the Dark Blues came away with the win, which she describes as the absolute highlight of her undergrad: family and friends in the stands and on the pitch with her, celebrating at the home of English rugby, relishing in her final few months at Oxford ... or so she thought. At the time, Chloe-Marie thought this was her last Varsity, and moved on to a research programme at KAUST in Saudi Arabia after graduating, but not before heading back to Dubai to compete in the Sevens with Dubai Phoenix again. This team went on to win the amateur finals, played on Pitch 1 where she had watched from the side lines as a child, seeing so many internationals take to the turf. However, after a few months at KAUST, it became clear that she just couldn’t get over the Blues. I played with Chloe-Marie at the beginning of the 2023 season (before spectacularly putting myself out of action with an ACL tear) and was obviously delighted to hear she’d be coming back to Iffley Road. When I ask her what pushed her to return, she says that despite meeting incredibly interesting people at KAUST and continuing to enjoy her studies to the point of choosing to pursue her academic career further, she truly missed the team and competition dynamic.

Hinting that she’d rather her parents weren’t made entirely aware of how largely this featured in her decision to return (sorry, Chlo), she tells me that the Varsity and Dark Blue experience was the best part of her uni experience. Through both the performance element and the community she gained, OURFC was absolutely central to her time at Oxford and the desire to push herself academically was matched by the drive to push herself on the field. She applied in January, interviewed in February and accepted in March, and was back in a Blues shirt by September, touring to the USA in preseason. When we spoke about her choice to run for captain, I hear a wonderful tale of support within the club and respect for the captains she has played with to date. Similar to her predecessor, Alex Wilkinson, Chloe-Marie’s focus this year is to create for her players the fantastic experience that she herself has enjoyed in Dark Blue, giving back to the OURFC family. She tells me that for her, there are two aspects to being Captain: creating a wider community for everyone involved at the club and consolidating the Blues squad as a high-quality performance team. Any member of OURFC knows the community that comes with it - something so valuable to Chloe-Marie that she returned. However, the Blues shirt is a privilege and an honour and she aims to lead with a combined style of ambition and inspiration to increase the performance standard throughout the year.

Finally, I’d like to leave with you with a Chloe-Marie Hawley Fact File – for all those alumni who I hope will introduce themselves to help her along her journey, these are the essentials: 

College: Queen’s 

Course: 2nd year DPhil in Biology, working on coral genetics 

OURFC Matches: 42

Tours: Dublin (2023), USA (2025) 

Blues: 2022, 2023, 2025