12 - Alumni Spotlight: George Chuter
George Chuter Class of 1994 George Chuter (Class of 1994) left Trinity to go to university with the intention of becoming a teacher. Halfway through his time at university the game went professional and he was immediately snapped up by Saracens. After Saracens, he went on to, play for the Leicester Tigers and was part of the club’s successful era during the 2000s, winning multiple Premiership and Heineken Cup titles. The pinnacle of his career came when he played for the England national team, earning 24 caps between 2003 and 2011.
Since retiring, George has remained involved in the sport and works as a coach and as a public speaker at Under the Posts Ltd. How did Trinity prepare you for playing rugby at a professional level? While the game was still amateur when I was playing at the school, I learnt quite early on what it would take to become a good rugby player. A few teachers were still playing a good level of rugby locally, and I tried to gather as much from them as possible. We
also had access to a decent gym and underwent a pretty good introduction to weight training that would become a very important part of professional rugby. And finally, the great New Zealand All Black captain Wayne Shelford came to the school one year, to run a coaching session with the First XV. Although I wasn’t old enough to be playing for the team yet, I heard stories of the training he ran, and some of the advice he gave the players and coaches, and I took a lot of that on board and put it to good use when I was starting to take rugby seriously. Your greatest try? I didn’t score lots of tries, unfortunately! However, the ones I did score tended to be more than just a rolling maul try where everyone else did the work. I scored one of the quickest hat-tricks in Premiership history when I scored three tries in the first 34 minutes of a game against Rotherham, which was memorable. But my favourite try was the only one I scored for England. It was in my first start, against Australia in Melbourne. I took a pass from the scrum half at a ruck, threw a huge dummy, and ran in from about 40 metres out. I wasn’t going very fast, but it felt like I was at the time!!