BEFORE Hugo Keenan rejoined the Sevens squad, he crammed to ensure he knew all the calls.
That was a reminder to captain Harry McNulty of just how far the programme had come since it started in 2015.
This afternoon Ireland will get their campaign underway against South Africa with a second game against Japan this evening.
Despite a tough draw – the other team in their pool is New Zealand, whom they face tomorrow – hopes are high of a big improvement on their 10th place finish on their Olympic debut in Tokyo.
As well as having a further three years under their belt, there has been a significant addition in the form of two-time Six Nations winner Hugo Keenan.
And McNulty has been impressed with the work ethic the full-back has shown since returning to the programme before his XVs breakthrough.
McNulty said: “He’s a total professional. His attitude to the whole thing was that he wanted to learn, wanted to get stuck in and give everything that he could to the programme.
“He would always have that open mindset in terms of asking questions around whether what he was doing was right or wrong.
“And he knew pretty much all of the calls by the time he came into the programme so he was just showcasing that he’s really just here to be a part of the team.
“As captain of the team, if anyone is coming in, that’s what you really look for in a player.
“Someone who’s looking to add as much as they can, even if, say, he didn’t get a call to play in the Olympics, but obviously he has got that call.
“It was pretty seamless. Obviously he was involved in the programme previously so he would have had some sort of idea what we were about.
“It’s changed a lot since then too but the fact that he’s played at the highest level with the men’s XV team and they’re so process-driven in there helps.
“They actually don’t get as much time in camp as I would have thought.
“Us being in camp and seeing them come in for two weeks and then they’re off to South Africa.
“So you can obviously tell that they put in a lot of hard work outside of training so he’s really just kind of brought that in.
“Him being with the backs, he’s obviously had more dealings with them in terms of where he needs to be, and the moves that he’s running, and all that kind of stuff
“But just in general play, if I see that maybe there was an area that he could make it easier for himself or vice versa, he might come to me and ask ‘Oh was that the right thing that I was meant to do there?’ so we have open conversations about it
“It’s always very easy to chat with Hugo and he always wants to take it on because he knows that’s going to help him play and help everybody else be better as well.”
It is a far cry from when everyone was trying to learn on the job back in 2015 when the programme started with ambitions that seemed more aspirational than realistic.
MEDAL AMBITIONS
McNulty, 31, recalled: “We were in DCU for our first training camps and I remember Anthony Eddy was there and the Rio Olympics was taking place the following season.
“In fairness to Ant, he did put ‘qualify for the Olympics’ as the first thing on the list of what this programme wanted to achieve.
“Second after that was qualification for the World Series because, at the time, we wouldn’t have been able to qualify for the World Series for a couple of years.
“Just because you had to go through the rankings, whereas we actually had the opportunity to qualify for Rio technically in the first year of the programme.
“I guess it was clear set from the very onset but when you’ve just been released from an academy and you’re going into this programme.
“That’s never really been around before from a structural point of view, you didn’t really know where it was going to go and what you could achieve
“For me, it was just trying to get as far as possible with the team, whatever length of time I was going to be involved in the team and somehow I’m still here nine years later.
“Day one when we came in it was literally like ‘here’s how you defend at a ruck, here’s how the shape should look.
“Where people should stand and where you should go’ so we actually walked through everything from the beginning.
“Now we’re so much further down the line and guys are coming and there’s an expectation to learn very quickly.”
Public awareness has increased but not with the same level of scrutiny that comes with more mainstream sports.
He said: “In terms of just general public, I always remember when we were first starting off someone would say, ‘Oh you play rugby, who do you play for?’ – and you’d say ‘the Sevens’ and they’d be like ‘Oh yeah I was always wondering why Ireland never had a Sevens team’ or ‘We have a Sevens team, do we? I didn’t know that’.
“That was always the thing, it happens still now to be fair but a lot of the time it would be ‘Why didn’t Ireland have a Sevens team?’
“Now at least the odd time someone might actually recognise you going around from the Sevens or they’d know what tournament you played in last or how your results would be going or when you’ve qualified for the Olympics, something big like that.
“It’s kind of nice as well, we’re still enough under the radar that.
“If we have a bad performance, nothing ever gets picked up in the media which is really nice and then when you do really well, like third in the World Cup, it really picks up.
“You can kind of slip in and out of the public consciousness pretty quickly.
“A lot of people pick up on all the good stuff we’ve done so it seems like the general public have a really good five of the Sevens and all of the stuff that has happened with it.
“I think it’s been great. It’s offered so many lads a second opportunity, to go and excel in the XVs if they go in there after or even if Sevens was their whole career.”
The strength of Ireland’s opponents mean their ambitions will be put to the test straight away but McNulty is unfazed.
He said: “There were quite a lot of tough pools throughout the season anyway so that kind of helps, rather than just getting a couple of easy pools in the season and then ‘of course we get a hard pool in the Olympics’
“It’s just kind of been hard the whole way through and had to fight a lot in those pool games. It is what it is. Every team can beat every team so you just have to make sure you’re on it when it counts.”