My Life in Rugby: Mark Foster – former Gloucester, Exeter Chiefs and Jersey back

To be involved in Exeter‘s first-ever Premiership game was an unbelievable experience – and to score against my former club Gloucester in front of the two best sets of fans in the country, the Tribe and the Shedheads, really was the stuff of dreams.
We were all loving life at the top end of the English game and nearly caused a major shock up at Welford Road a week later.
I played two and a half seasons with the Chiefs and winning promotion from the Championship was a memorable moment from my time there. While others took their foot off the gas a little bit around Christmas – back then you tended to have a week off – Rob Baxter decided to do a second pre-season and we were still firing on all cylinders by the time we beat Bristol in the rain in the final. I played at full-back for the first time since Year 10 after Bryan Rennie fractured his eye socket when messing about with Danny Gray in a team run the day before.
With the final being played so late there wasn’t much time for us to dwell on the success and were quickly put through our paces by ex-Green Beret, Paddy Anson; I’ve never known a pre-season like it. The willingness to fight for each other at Exeter was incredible. I remember Rob standing up in a meeting, after we’d had an inordinate amount of players go down injured in a pre-season game, and saying that unless our legs were broken we had to get back on our feet and into the defensive line. That’s the way it was from then on.
I remember breaking my ankle against Leicester and my first reaction was to try to stand up and get ready to tackle. That kind of hard mentality is now serving the club so well. Lads like Henry Slade and Jack Nowell grew up knowing nothing else.
For me, I couldn’t have asked for a better grounding than my seven years at Gloucester. I’d never really had any aspirations to be a professional, it all came about after the comprehensive school I was at, Howard of Effingham in Surrey, made it through to The Daily Mail Schools Cup last eight. The Whitgift School headmaster was watching and offered me a scholarship there and then.
I went on to play for England Schoolboys and was offered the chance to join Gloucester on an academy type scheme. I went for it after turning down a place to study economics at Bath University and luckily survived a cull when all but six players were released.
I was fortunate to learn the ropes alongside old heads like Mark Cornwell and Andy Deacon in an old-school, physical environment, and to also have once-in-a-generation players like James Forrester and James Simpson-Daniel alongside. We won the European Challenge Cup and reached two Premiership finals while I was there. Dean Ryan and Bryan Redpath did an incredible job with that group of boys.
I left Gloucester for Exeter to get more game time and the same reason applied when I joined Jersey on loan from the Chiefs, in February 2012. I could have opted to stay in the West Country after getting an offer from the Cornish Pirates but Jersey came with a good recommendation from former Chiefs teammate Charlie Walker-Blair.
Again, I was fortunate to be at a club with strong ties to the community and a passionate support base. I signed a two-year deal after the initial loan and started to do some backs coaching as my playing days wound down.
Since retiring, I’ve not gone down the coaching route, although I did toy with the idea of becoming a ref at one point. Instead, I chose a career in private client management, at First Names Group on the Island.