If you had told 12-year-old Josh Bartlett he’d grow up to be a professional rugby player, he would have fallen about laughing.

Maybe even chucked a table tennis paddle at you.

But if ever there was a poster boy against early specialisation in sport, the 23-year-old Steamers and Highlanders prop is it.

Bartlett joined fellow Steamers stars Frank Vaenuku and Toby Taylor for a Bayleys-sponsored training session at Mount Maunganui Intermediate yesterday.

The school’s rugby sevens and Rip Rugby teams were put through their paces ahead of the Zespri Aims Games, which start late next week.

And halfway through the session, the 1.85m prop revealed he had not even been good enough to make the Tauranga Intermediate rugby sevens team when he was the same age.

“Cricket was my passion all the way through school but as far as rugby was concerned, I was quite fat and useless at intermediate,” he said.

“It wasn’t until I was under-15, when one of my mates convinced me to come along and trial again – it was my first game of rugby since that trial at intermediate, but my career picked up pretty quickly after that.”

A quick look at the records confirms what Bartlett remembers.

Bay of Plenty rugby player Josh Bartlett helping train the Mount Maunganui Intermediate rip rugby team. Photo / Jamie Troughton

In fact, ttwo Tauranga Intermediate teams were selected in 2015 – one was an invitational side to round out the draw – and Bartlett missed both.

Current Steamers teammates Veveni Lasaqa and Lucas Cashmore made the top side, with first-five Cashmore as captain.

What stung even more for Bartlett was that instead of naming the teams, coaches just named the two players who missed out. He was one of them.

Gutted? A little – but he wasn’t about to let his Aims Games dream slip away.

“I insisted on having the week off school though, so I joined table tennis and we won a gold medal in the teams competition.

“It was a cool experience to represent your school and even though it wasn’t in a sport I was 100 per cent passionate about, it was still a lot of fun.”

His fellow Steamers prop Taylor would agree wholeheartedly – he played basketball for Aquinas College at the same 2015 Aims tournament, and absolutely loved it.

Bay of Plenty prop Toby Taylor played basketball for Aquinas College at the 2015 Aims Games tournament. Photo / Jamie Troughton

To add an even thicker layer of irony, Tauranga Intermediate’s much-vaunted sevens side that year lost their semi-final, to cross-town rivals Mount Maunganui.

Mount Maunganui – featuring captain Grady Forbes, who helped Northland win the Ranfurly Shield last week – went on to beat Kelston in the final and become the first local school to win sevens gold.

This year’s Zespri Aims Games teams will face considerably more competition.

An astonishing 14,506 entries from a record 467 schools will take part in the week-long tournament, which begins on September 5.

Bartlett has a simple message for every athlete, however.

“At this age, don’t worry about putting pressure on to be somebody or to play a certain sport – you just need to love what you do, no matter what it is, and be a good person.”

- Content supplied by Aims Games