Zac Ward
Rugby Sevens
BIOGRAPHY
Zac Ward represented Ireland in the men’s Rugby Sevens tournament at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, finishing 6th – Ireland’s best ever Olympic finish in the event.
One of the team’s most prominent performers, he scored four tries across the tournament. Ward is from Ballynahinch, Co. Down, and comes from a distinguished rugby family: his father Andy Ward won 28 caps for Ireland and captained the Ulster team that won the 1999 Heineken Cup. In one of rugby’s most celebrated family stories, Zac was born during the quarter-final of that Heineken Cup campaign, with Andy substituted and given a police escort from Ravenhill to Lagan Valley Hospital to be present at his son’s birth.
Zac attended Down High School and Hartpury College and began his career as a flanker with Ballynahinch RFC. After joining the Ireland Sevens programme in 2021, he shed six to seven kilograms to make the transition from fifteens to sevens and became one of the most prolific try-scorers on the World Series circuit, accumulating 125 tries in 90 appearances.
He was named Men’s Sevens Players’ Player of the Year for 2023-24, voted by his peers. After the Paris Games he signed a three-year contract with Ulster, switching to the wing position in the fifteen-a-side game.
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