Women’s Rugby

In the name of women’s rugby, girls and women lace up their boots, put on their kit, run, ruck, tackle, maul, and scrum every week across campuses. Mia Denman, Sport Intern for rugby development, tells us about one of the fastest-growing female sports.

Rugby being the sport it is, hasn’t historically been associated with women, or been accessible to many women. This is changing in the current climate, with England’s Red Roses’ great success across the past couple of years, in particular coming 2nd in the 2021 World Cup and local clubs looking to expand their offer for women and girls, more people are turning their heads to look at facilitating, developing and expanding women’s rugby.

University of Manchester Womens Rugby Club facilitates women’s rugby from beginner to performance level, as we have 3 teams: the 1st and 2nd teams who compete in BUCS, as well as a ‘Development’ team who play friendlies against other university ‘Dev’ teams or local clubs through the Inner Warrior Series programme. Our 1st and 2nd teams are competitive in the leagues they are in and although the 1st team is mostly made up of girls who had played rugby before joining uni, lots of girls ‘work their way up the ranks’ and end up playing for the 1st team after perfecting their skills. The Development team gives the opportunity to play games to girls who are very new to the sport. The games are lower intensity than BUCS and are fantastic in building the confidence of new players, perfecting skills and learning the game.

Rugby is a different type of fitness to a lot of other sports, in that it combines strength, stamina and speed. Different positions mean very different things and individual players can have a specific skill set, whether that be speed, strength or stamina, that is utilised by putting them in a position on the pitch that plays to this strength. Because of this, there’s a place for everyone within the sport and also a chance to try out different positions and see which suits your playing style best. Women’s rugby, in general, is a very inclusive community.

“We’ve had some intense training sessions and hopefully we can keep up the intensity and the morale and motivation for the game. I think we both said the biggest will like hardest thing we have to deal with as captain’s, is kind of keeping everyone happy.”

 

Roisin Smith, Vice-Captain Women’s Rugby 

Student Spotlight

Emily Davies tells us about her journey to finding women’s rugby and the challenges she’s faced along the way.

Background

I have been involved in sports from a young age, I was that kid who had a sporting class every night doing something different, and I got quite good at some of them. I used to swim competitively, do gymnastics, and play netball and hockey. I slowly stopped swimming due to insecurities and comments from others, but since coming to university, I have decided to take up swimming recreationally and have found enjoyment in this again.

I only played hockey and netball because they were the “girl’s sports” in my high school and they didn’t offer rugby or football to us. Gymnastics I still enjoy it today. I had a major setback with ligament damage to my ankle two weeks before lockdown. Although I had a serious confidence knock instead of completely leaving the sport I was asked to become a coach and have Level 1 training and worked within my local club throughout sixth form. University has opened up many more sports to me, and one which I have always wanted to partake in but never had the formal opportunity to – rugby. My family is massively a rugby family with both my dad and brothers playing, but back home there were no girl’s teams so that was one way university allowed me to participate in sports in my own way.

On women’s rugby union

I am part of the Women’s Rugby Union, and also the Women in Science and Engineering Society. It’s empowering to see so many women getting involved and being out of their comfort zone. Although I have always wanted to play rugby, going to training for the first few weeks was so daunting and having to go without the friend I joined up with even more so.

Barriers to participation

There are barriers to women participating in physical activity. There’s the obvious barrier of there not being as many women’s teams for different sports. Along with this the lack of funding and exposure for women’s sports. A common question is, “do women’s rugby play the same rules as men’s?”. This highlights how underappreciated women’s sport is.

Despite completely falling out of love with sports and lockdown and all the awful things life was throwing at me, it found its way back. I was so apprehensive about going back into sports after the way people treated me, but I realised it wasn’t sports that were the issue. It was the people. I honestly haven’t had so much fun (sober) in a long time as training and playing matches. I was really surprised that I was able to enjoy sports and want to go to training despite it being so tiring.

I would encourage women to join a team sport. I’ll be honest. I never understood what people talking about with the endorphins released after physical exercise because I could never feel them. When you’re in a team and having fun together, you’ll feel good regardless.

Check back throughout March to discover more This Girl Can features.

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