By 
After years of mediocrity, which resulted in Dungannon Rugby Club falling from All-Ireland League champions in 2001 to battling to stay in 2B following a series of relegations, current first XV captain Adam Milligan is enjoying a wave of optimism that surrounds the club.
After former player Andy Hughes ‘steadied the ship’, Jonny Gillespie came on board as head coach three years ago and he has taken the first XV from a team that produced erratic form to one that knows how to grind out wins, earning promotion to AIL 2A last season via the play-offs and as things stand, they could achieve the same feat again this term.
And while the Lisburn man is reveling in their form over the last season and a half, he’s not getting carried away by it.
The 26-year-old openside flanker is one of many in the team to have caught the eye in recent campaigns with a series of consistent performances that have seen the Stevenson Park men start their climb back up the AIL ranks.
But had it not been for his entering Friends School in Lisburn after finishing primary school, he’d, most likely, be living life in his sister’s shade as a soccer player. Adam’s older sibling is Caragh Hamilton (nee Milligan), who has over fifty international caps for Northern Ireland and is currently plying her trade for Sundaerland – on loan from Championship side Nottingham Forest.
Like his sister, and his family as a whole, soccer was Adam’s first love, but after going to Friends, he soon discovered rugby and from there he moved to Dunganon RFC at the age of 18.
“ My family is a football family and I played football but then I went to Friends and they don’t offer football so I had no option but to switch to rugby. All my mates were playing and we had a decent wee group and a decent year as far as Friends standards go!,” he explained with a laugh.
“The only good thing, I would say, is Friends don’t get too serious about it, so you keep the enjoyment of it and I think that’s why boys keep playing.
“And I discovered was slightly better at it and being slightly outshone by my sister at football, I was sick of that so I picked a sport I’d be better at! I think I found myself doing better at rugby and I enjoyed it so much.
“Then Hugh McCaughey, who was involved with our rugby team in school, kind of said ‘do you want to come to Dungannon?’ so I started going up with his son, Ross, and another guy who went to Friends and that’s how I ended up at Dungannon.”
As a fairly slight teenager, Adam found his feet in the seconds at Stevenson Park, where he rose to the rank of captain before progressing to the first XV after some productive weight gain during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I played twos when I first joined and then I captained the twos and finally got my chance post-Covid when I had put on a bit of weight, which was a good thing for me!,” he added. “Everyone went one way or the other during Covid but it paid off for me because I needed it.
“I was skinny, I probably had that footballer build but I finally filled out because I was able to train in a gym over Covid. My sister had actually built one because she was still here at the time, so I was able to train when other people maybe couldn’t and they were maybe eating all round them.”
Milligan’s increased size allied to more focus on strength and conditioning within Dungannon RFC have not only formed the basis of his personal development on the pitch, but the first XV’s too. Since Jonny Gillespie took the reigns, an improvement in the squad’s physicality and athleticism has been one of the main aims and while there is still a way to go on that front, Adam believes the progress meade has been measurable.
“I think [our physicality and athleticism] has come on massively over recent years,” he observed. “I played under Andy Hughes as well and maybe we didn’t kick on under him at that time in terms of S&C (Strength and Conditioning) but I think the guys we’ve signed and the guys who are at the club are more committed themselves to do it on their own.
“Obviously, this year, we’ve brought in Stuart Lester who has been doing our S&C. There’s more focus on it and the gym has been redone and all for us, so we don’t have an excuse not to do it any more. And I think that’s something that Jonny highlighted, that we weren’t as athletic or at that level and especially when you’re moving up a division, we needed to be for this season.
“I always find with country clubs, they have that grit, they have that determination, they have that strength anyway, but it’s the athleticism, the speed of the game that maybe lacks, but I think we’ve definitely, by our league position, we’re showing that we’re up to that now at this point.
“Could we still get a bit better in those terms? For sure, there’s still more to come because this is only our first year of really doing it so I think there’s more to come. It’s definitely a big improvement.”
Along with stronger bodies has come stronger minds at Stevenson Park and over the last season and a half, since the focus on S&C has grown, so too has the first XV’s consistency, form and progress on the pitch, resulting in promotion at the end of last season and a push for a similar result this term.
And Milligan feels that aspect of their training, allied to Gillespie’s attention to detail and knowledge of the game have given them one key ingredient to continue their climb up the divisions – self belief.
“I think we probably didn’t have as strong a squad during the times under Hughesy,” he acknowledged.
“We always seemed to raise our game depending on who we were playing. We’d look like we were on par [with title challenging teams] but then the next week we’d travel down to a side who weren’t as strong and play at that level.
“I think the coaching, we’re probably more well-drilled under Jonny and once we got into that habit of winning – I said this when I was talking to the IRFU at the start of the year – once you get into that habit, it’s hard to stop.
“You always have that belief that you can win every game and we do have that right now. We’re never down and out in any game. You just have to look back at the semi-final last year. We were getting well beat by Clogher but we always believed we could get back into it and once you make that winning habit, it’s hard to get out of.
“What I was worried about this year was maybe the likes of the Ballymena game we lost or the Barnhall game we lost, we bounced back, we don’t put two bad results together. We come back. I think we’re more well-drilled, there’s a belief and a real togetherness in our squad. If you look at it, a lot of it’s been together now for as long as I’ve been there with a few really good additions over the last couple of years which have made it a nice combination.”
Ahead of the 2025-26 season, few would have earmarked Dungannon as potential promotion candidates for a place in 1B, but the belief they built up the season before was boosted early this campaign and the team haven’t looked back since.
“If you ask anyone around the club, they were like ‘I’d have taken eighth!’,” he admitted. “And there probably was that thought, but I think in pre-season in the Ulster Cup or Ulster League, whatever you want to call it, results weren’t too positive and people were thinking ‘oh, here we go, they’ll be straight back down again’.
“We didn’t really change our squad at all, it’s the same squad, but once we played and realised ‘we’re at this level’.
“If you look back at last season, we finished 16 points above third place, so we were at that level above 2B last year, so going in to this year, once you played the first couple of games – I think Greystones were a team we’d met so many times but to go and bonus point them in the first game, once you’ve got that under your belt, I think everyone was like ‘OK, hold on, we are made for this league’ and we just kicked on from there. “
At present, Dungannon are well placed for a play-off berth come season’s end. They are second in the table and clear of any threat of relegation and while they haven’t mentioned the ‘P’ word (promotion) as such, the players know it’s now a realistic aspiration.
“We know now the position we’ve put ourselves in, there’s no getting away from it,” Milligan added. “We want to be in the play-offs and in the position we are, it would be a failure not to be in them. There’s no hiding away from that but we don’t talk about it, we don’t say ‘this is what we’re going to do in the play-offs’ or ‘this is who we’re going to play’, we just want to get there.
“There’s no hiding the fact we should be there and everyone thinks we should be there. And the thing is, when you do get to the play-offs, you don’t know what can happen, it’s about getting yourself into that position.”
Even though they aren’t discussing promotion at present, should they achieve it for the second year in a row, Milligan believes, with a few additions, he and his team-mates will once again be able to compete at the higher level.
“I think [1B] would be another step up,” he acknowledged. “We’ve played some of the teams up there before, the likes of your Instonians, City of Armagh and we know how strong they are.
“I don’t think this squad would be phased by that, there’s a real no fear attitude with us and we know we can produce top performances, we have before against big sides, especially the Ulstersides.
“I think we’d definitely need to recruit – again there’s no denying that – you need a bigger squad for a better division, there’s no doubt about that. But again, we’re not thinking that far ahead. It’s about getting to the end of this season and seeing where we’re at.”
