Bristol’s Jake Woolmore has been pursuing a couple of personal goals for a while. Beneath the Friday night lights in Northampton he is about to tick off one of them by breaking the Bears’ top-flight appearance record. If he is also able to mark this special occasion by surrendering his status as the least likely person in the league to score a try, so much the better.
With fifth-placed Bristol seeking a win over the league leaders to bolster their playoff hopes, the 35-year-old prop is quick to stress the team’s interests come first. That said, if he makes it over the try‑line for the first time on his 142nd league appearance for the club (and 184th in all competitions), the celebrations will be even mightier. As he puts it: “I can’t imagine there are many people who’ve played over 180 games for one club without scoring.”
Any club would dearly love a player like Woolmore: unselfish, committed, wonderfully enthusiastic and a role model for aspiring professionals everywhere. One of his favourite tricks is to pretend to be a wheezing old pro in pre-season, only to leave unwary youngsters trailing in his wake during fitness testing. “I pride myself on running a decent bronco time so you can quite often surprise some younger lads. I have been known to heckle a few of them.”
Easing past the Bristol Prem appearance record held by another evergreen prop, Darren Crompton, will be an even greater achievement given his winding road via Yeovil College, Sherborne RFC, Taunton Titans, Exeter Chiefs and Jersey Reds to a belated Prem debut at the age of 27. “When I first started I had a bet with my best mate. He said: ‘If you get one start in the Premiership I’ll get a shirt with your name on the back.’
“That was always my goal, just to get that one start. I don’t know what the secret ingredient is but I always joke that if you don’t peak too much you can’t fall off too far. It’s probably my stubbornness that allows me to keep going. It also helps to be in the front row … you haven’t got to maintain Louis Rees‑Zammit speed.”
On the no-try front, the all‑time Prem record-holder is Kieran Brookes, once of Northampton, who played 158 top-flight games without scoring. The former Newcastle forward Mark Sorenson is in second place with 144 but Woolmore is closing in fast. “People say: ‘Do you not want to score? And I say: ‘I don’t care as long as someone else does.’ It’s become a bit of a joke now. Rather than scoring one, people are saying I’d be better off having the record for scoring none. Maybe, but it would be nice not to sound completely useless.”
Woolmore, either way, is also a firm believer that younger pros need to find an outlet off the field. Having previously worked at a college for students with learning difficulties and trained as a barber, he and his Bears teammate Harry Thacker now have an award‑winning business offering saunas and ice baths to anyone looking to enhance their physical and mental wellbeing.
Having a life beyond rugby has certainly helped him, and helps explain why he is still going strong. “I remember eight or nine years ago when we were told a yoga instructor was coming in to the club and was anybody interested. Half the lads pooh-poohed it but the eight lads who did sign up turned out, at the end of the season, to be the ones with the lowest injury rate. I saw a massive benefit, not least in doing something other than rugby. As I always tell the younger lads, have something else.
“In today’s society it’s also about switching off a little bit. Harry and I discussed how we could offer that to other people. The physical benefits are obviously there with the sauna and the ice and then you’ve got the mental side of things. When I started out playing I was dreaming about rugby and being in training sessions. That’s clearly not very healthy. It’s a huge benefit for lads to do stuff outside rugby.”
Right now, though, there is no avoiding the obvious. Five points adrift of fourth-placed Exeter with three regular season games leaves scant margin for error, with fixtures against Bath and Sale Sharks looming and Saracens also finishing strongly. “We’ve put ourselves in a more difficult position than we wanted to but it’s still very much do-able,” says Woolmore, primed to rumble off the bench and take over from England’s Ellis Genge for the last half hour or so.
“We believe we can do a job on Saints but we’ve believed we could do a job on a few other teams and let ourselves down a little bit. It’s very easy to hit the panic button … but we’ve had a good record against Saints over the years. We believe we can turn them over no matter how they’re going. We’ve got a point to prove and a bee in our bonnet at the minute. We’ve got all the tools, we’ve just got to go and do it.”