You’d be hard pressed to find a greater advocate for the game of sevens than Henry Hutchison. 

From an 18-year-old debutant more than a decade ago to his place now as Australia’s captain, all-time leading try scorer and most capped player, Hutchison exudes enthusiasm for the game. 

Passion is an overused word in sport but it’s the most fitting for both how he plays and how he speaks about it. 

He has seen it all and lived it all. The ultimate competitor, Hutchison has ridden the highs of Australia’s stunning series win in 2022 and the lows of narrowly missing out on an Olympic medal in Paris. And he’s come back from serious injury and switched position into the heart of the action along the way. 

Now 29, it feels like he’s just getting started as he speaks about the game. 

“It’s a bloody hard sport,” he said. “It’s pretty unforgiving, physically so difficult and mentally pretty draining but sevens is full of players who are very internally motivated, which is a great skillset to have as an athlete but also as a human moving forward into your life and to your next chapter.”

Hutchison has been in the thick of everything Australia has done this season and in some minds is in career-best form. 

But the man himself is a hard marker, revealing minor elbow surgery after the HSBC SVNS stop in New York meant he didn’t feel at his best in Hong Kong.

“I had just 12 days of training and the game is so fast and so elite, two weeks of not catching a ball and not running with the team I just felt a little step behind,” he said. 

Hong Kong aside, Hutchison is happy with where is own game is at right now. “The team’s playing really well, which makes it easy for me to play well because we can all just focus on our own backyard, doing our own job, which wasn’t always the case last season.”

After finishing third in the regular season, Australia came sixth in Hong Kong last time out. 

Hutchison knows his team can compete in the World Championship Series and believes they’ve made some big strides during the five-week lead-in to HSBC SVNS Valladolid this weekend. 

“I feel like we’re probably the best team in the pool stages but we just don’t quite back it up in a semi or a quarter. 

“We’ve been consistent and we’ve been making semi-finals but we haven’t been able, besides Dubai, to progress past that semi, so that’s a massive area of focus for us,” he said. 

“We’re also aware that it doesn’t happen overnight – the competition is just so tight and so close, and we’re still in a growth phase from a really new team last season that developed massively.”

With three Olympics under his belt, the drive for a medal hasn’t dimmed and thoughts of LA 2028 spur him on.

“After going so close in Paris there’s a big burning desire there to walk away with an Olympic medal, to have something to show for the hard work, so from an Olympic point of view there’s that medal incentive for sure, and from an Australian rugby and team point of view, we’re very ambitious.”

His motivations go beyond titles and trophies. Hutchison is realistic that high-performance sport is a ‘results business’ but he would love the rugby community in Australia to know how hard they work and how tough the sport is. 

“I feel like we’re always kind of scratching the surface and if this group can really stick together and push through we can do some good things for the men’s programme here in Australia, put ourselves on the map.”

He’s also excited about where the game is tracking. While he believes it could use a couple of small tweaks, this season’s HSBC SVNS calendar of nine tournaments and the new World Championship format has felt like a return to a full-time series, as it was before and coming out of Covid. 

He’s signed up to play both in the Indian Premier League and Ultimate Sevens and is thrilled that many will now effectively be able to play sevens year-round.

“I look at my season now and I started in November and I’m going to finish at the end of September. 

“I’m going to have four weeks off which is exactly what I want – we don’t want more breaks, we want to be playing at this age and at this time in our lives.”

As an advocate for the sport, he sees a huge opportunity.

“It just more eyeballs on the game that we love and we know that is pretty special.  I feel like the rest of the world might be still sleeping on it.”

But the first job is to get Australia right in the mix for the World Championship by performing in Spain this weekend. 

“It’s so great to be playing sevens back in Europe but we know we’re right in the mix for the World Championship if we perform in Valladolid.” 

Hutchinson expects teams to be flying at the Estadio Jose Zorrilla. “Spain day one could be a day where it shoots our season north or south. Are we going to be back in the medal conversations and competing or are we going to be scrapping for relegation and promotion?”

He added: “They’re all important but Spain day one is probably the most important day of the year.”

If Henry Hutchison believes that to be the case, who are we to argue? The man knows his sport inside and out – a champion of sevens on the field, a champion for sevens off it.