Conversations in Sport is the twenty-fourth series of the Half Court Press Podcast. Here, Tao MacLeod talks to a variety of different sporting personalities, who have a range of roles and experiences within their respective games. We chat about a range of topics including domestic participation, international tournaments, as well as corporate responsibility within sport.
In episode four we chat to John Hardie and Matthew Taylor, who both work within the sports programmes at Edinburgh Academy. John Hardie is a retired rugby player, who has moved into coaching. Born in New Zealand, he qualified to play for Scotland due to a familial link to the Scottish county of Fife. In New Zealand, he played for Southland and the Highlanders, before moving over to the UK. Here he played for Edinburgh and Newcastle Falcons. In 2015 John was picked to play for Scotland in the 2015 World Cup, reaching the quarter final stage. Since August 2024, John Hardie has been the Assistant Director of Rugby at the Edinburgh Academy.
Matty Taylor is a newly capped goalkeeper for the Scottish national hockey team. He was a part of the squad that won the inaugural second tier of the FIH Nations Cup, in Muscat, Oman, that was held in February 2025. Also, a teacher at Edinburgh Academy, he is one of the coaches within the private school’s hockey programme. Having come through the youth teams at Inverleith Hockey Club he turned out for their first team, before moving across to play for local rivals Grange and then the University of Edinburgh team, with whom he won the Scottish Cup. In this episode we chat about school and club sport, multi-sports education for youth players, as well as the potential benefits of professionalism for minority sports.
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