Billy McGinty has played rugby league with Jason Robinson and has coached him at rugby union.

That’s a pretty decent couple of lines on a rugby CV which contains plenty of other notable achievements as well.

The 52-year-old has a lifetime of experiences to draw on and this season the lucky recipients of that knowledge are the players at Tewkesbury Rugby Club.

McGinty was appointed head coach earlier in the summer and his initial impressions of the club are very favourable.

“I’m excited by how far this club can go,” he said of the Gloucester Two side. “It has lots of potential. It’s a real club, a true rugby club.”

McGinty, himself, is a true rugby man. He made his name as a rugby league player in the 1980s and 1990s before switching codes in the early noughties to coach in rugby union.

He was a very good rugby league player; good enough to play for Great Britain – he was selected to go on the 1992 Great Britain Lions tour of Australia and New Zealand – and for Wigan in the early 90s when they were dominating the sport.

His coaching record since switching codes is pretty impressive, too, and he has served time with Worcester Warriors and Edinburgh as well as at Sale.

Ask him which form of the game he prefers and he answers: “I appreciate both of them. I thoroughly enjoy both of them.

“I love the technical side of rugby union. Every breakdown is a battle, every tackle is a battle, a real challenge.

“But once you get rugby league into your bones it never leaves you.”

The Glasgow-born McGinty, who hasn’t coached rugby league “for 13 or 14 years”, played both codes as a youngster growing up in the north west of England.

“I went to Wade Deacon High School in Widnes,” he said. “It was the only school in the area that played rugby union, every other school played rugby league.

“I played for Merseyside and Lancashire under-15s as a centre but in those days rugby union was very ‘rah rah’ and the only way you could get selected for England schoolboys was if you went to an independent school.

“I knew I was better than the players being selected for England under-15s but I also knew I wasn’t going to get a chance so I threw in my lot with Widnes Tigers.”

McGinty had been with Widnes since the age of seven and 10 years later he was signing forms for a club renowned as one of the hottest hotbeds in rugby league.

He was a back row in a stellar career that also took in Warrington and Workington.

And when he hung up his boots after a career that took in more than 200 games he was not lost to the sport as he moved easily into coaching.

“I was assistant coach at Wigan and I was assistant coach at Huddersfield Giants,” he said. “But I was not getting the breaks I deserved to be a head coach.”

It was about that time Sale, for whom Jim Mallinder was then the head coach, made contact with McGinty.

“It was a good time to go across because rugby union had just become professional,” McGinty said. “I thought I could offer a lot.”

So how did rugby union differ from rugby league?

“It was a huge change,” he said. “Rugby league had been professional for a long time. It had the best coaches, the best nutrition, the best everything.

“Rugby union was only just starting out and it was a massive catch-up. I looked at it and thought rugby union was 10 years behind rugby league.”

Nevertheless, McGinty fully embraced union and thoroughly enjoyed his time at Sale.

“We did very well,” he said. “We won the second tier European competition and finished fourth in the league. The year after I left they won the league.”

Next stop for McGinty was Worcester Warriors where John Brain was director of rugby.

Promotion to the Premiership was followed by two finals in the European Challenge Cup although the club were never able to truly establish themselves in the top flight.

“When I went there was only one stand at Sixways,” said McGinty, who was the club’s defence and skills coach. “How much the club has developed is down to Cecil Duckworth. He put so much into it, he’s a fantastic man.

“It would be great if the club could keep developing and not always be a team fighting relegation.”

After Worcester McGinty headed north across the border and onto Edinburgh but it was after his time there that he admits he “fell out of love with rugby for a bit”.

“I wasn’t enjoying it so much even though rugby was my life,” he said. “I spoke to my wife Corrine and she asked me who had I enjoyed coaching the most.

“I replied Wigan Warriors under-17s and Wigan Warriors under-21s.”

It was that realisation that brought him back down south – and to Malvern College specifically – where he now coaches the school’s 1st XV.

He also took on the top job at Malvern Rugby Club – a position now held by ex-Gloucester full-back Rob Cook who is the club’s director of rugby, as well as being a player and a coach.

“I thoroughly enjoyed it at Malvern,” he said. “It tests you a lot more in many ways at that level because there is only a limited amount of time to train. Players go on holidays during the season or text you to say they can’t play because they are going shopping so you have to think on your feet.

“Before I went there they’d been relegated two seasons in a row. They weren’t in great shape but we stabilised things.”

It was not a dissimilar situation to the one facing him at Tewkesbury, who dropped out of Gloucester One at the end of the last campaign.

“Yes, it is déjà vu,” he said, “but it’s something I want to do again. I want to help the team as much as I can. I brought a lot of players through from the Colts set-up at Malvern and I want to do the same at Tewkesbury.”

While McGinty’s commitment to Tewkesbury is total, he may have to miss the final two league games of the season.

That’s because his 21-year-old daughter Heather is a very good sprint hurdler and is targeting a place in the Scotland team at next year’s Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in Queensland, Australia, which run from 4th to 15th April.

“She runs for Birchfield Harriers and is the ninth fastest in Great Britain over 100 metres hurdles” he said. “She obviously wants to get to the Commonwealth Games. If she does I can’t miss that!”