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Pursuing a law degree demands intense focus and full-time dedication. Yet, for this former professional rugby union player, balancing the pressures of elite sport alongside his studies was a challenge he successfully overcame.
Speaking on a recent episode of The Protégé Podcast, Michael Wells, an associate at Black Bay Lawyers, shared what inspired him to pursue a law degree while competing at the peak of his rugby union career and how he juggled the intense pressures of elite sport with the intellectual demands of law school.
Wells began his rugby career at 21, enjoying a professional journey spanning more than a decade with some of the sport’s most prestigious and recognisable teams, including the Brumbies, Rebels, and Waratahs.
“My first professional contract was at 21. I started with the Australian men’s sevens team, then I moved to the ACT Brumbies in Super Rugby, spent a year there, then moved back home to Sydney,” he said.
“Three years with the New South Wales Waratahs, then two years with the Melbourne Rebels, and then another two years with the Western Force over in Perth to then round out my career.”
One of the most significant and meaningful achievements of Wells’ career was representing his country multiple times.
“Between schoolboy level and the Australian Sevens team, representing your country is obviously a great honour, and it’s something that very few people get to do, and so it was always great to be able to do that,” he said.
While travelling the country and competing on the national rugby union stage was his dream, Wells revealed that he was simultaneously pursuing another goal: becoming a lawyer.
Although these two very different paths ran in parallel, Wells credited his determination and clear goals for successfully managing both.
“Just the skill and the ability to just compartmentalise aspects of your life. I’m very much [an] objectives and goal-based person. So the goal was to achieve the degree. The goal was to be a professional rugby player. So whilst they ran in parallel, it was important to make sure that one didn’t jeopardise the other,” he said.
Another key motivation for completing his law degree while playing professional sport was Wells’ awareness that a rugby career has a limited lifespan and the need to plan for life beyond the game.
“Knowing that rugby has a pretty finite life, and I was lucky enough to have 10 years [playing it], law was obviously something that one is more sustainable, and two, it’s obviously got a greater longevity to it. It was going to be my vocation after rugby, and if rugby wasn’t ever something that actually amounted to anything, it was going to be my overall career in law,” he said.
“You can’t suddenly retire from rugby and just fall into a career as a lawyer, similar to how some people fall into commentary capacities after playing. It was very much something that I had to do because I had that goal.”
While both law and professional rugby demanded significant dedication and long hours, Wells noted that successfully managing both required exceptional time management and clear task prioritisation.
“It’s funny as much as professional rugby is a full-time career, you do have time off. We had our regular week, and we had one day a week where we were off. So a lot of your life, admin studies, all that stuff got pushed into one day. Then you just needed to be extremely efficient on that day,” he said.
“Then it’s just very much [about] time management. You’ll have some late nights, you’ll have some busy periods, you’ll have some easier periods.”
Although Wells managed to balance the demands of two very different worlds, he admitted that one of the most challenging aspects was the mental shift required between them.
“One thing is that the way you communicate is obviously very different. Legal writing and legal communication are very different from rugby communication, for good reason, I would think,” he said.
“So being able to just switch your brain, it’s almost switching between your left and right side of your brain and just being able to switch onto certain things when, when you need to, that was probably the biggest one.”
In addition to the mental shift required between sport and study, Wells also spoke about the physical toll of professional rugby and the challenge of staying mentally sharp while physically exhausted.
“It’s the physical demand. Obviously, rugby and professional sport have a strong physical demand, and when you’re physically tired, obviously, your brain is one of the first things to want to have a break. So, just maintaining motivation and the ability to just keep your brain going even when you’re physically just spent,” he said.
