US women's rugby seeks gold on road to Rio Olympic Games

On Thursday, in Dubai, a squad of American rugby players will begin their attempt to qualify for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio.

In the US, much has been made of rugby’s return to the Games after 90 years, largely because America’s men are the reigning Olympic champions. Rather less has been made of the fact that Olympic rugby sevens will also be contested by women. The players who will take the field in Dubai on Thursday are the US Women’s Eagles.

Women’s rugby has a rich tradition in the US, not least because the Eagles were the first official world champions, in 1991. Women still represent a minority in a minority sport (according to USA Rugby there are around 100,000 players of all ages and levels in the US, around 20,000 of them female), but their game is growing. Furthermore, the women are, arguably, better placed to make it to Rio. International exposure is coming.

“The USA qualifying will have a big effect on women’s rugby,” says Julie Prentice, co-founder of Serevi Rugby, a Seattle-based company which is helping to drive the national search for Olympic talent. “In sports it’s still not known. When I mention women’s rugby, if I say my daughter plays, I still get a lot of ‘Oh, really?’ And raised eyebrows.

“To the mainstream sports enthusiast, to know that women’s rugby is out there, to know it’s played with exactly the same rules as the men, I think that will do a lot for the game. Obviously it will just be the beginning, but it’s a generational thing and I look at where soccer was in this country in the late 80s, the 90s, with Mia Hamm and the World Cup, and I think rugby is on that trajectory.”

Prentice’s mention of soccer shows the thinking of many people in women’s rugby – that the girls’ game is at an important, fertile stage of growth. She herself is “a rugby mom as well as a rugby business person”; her daughter was named in this year’s inaugural women’s high-school All-American team. But to many parents and daughters, rugby for girls can seem a little outlandish, even dangerous.

“It’s there, it’s interesting,” Prentice says of such concern. “If you look at our numbers for our youth programming, the number of girls doing that is closer to 25%. This is boys and girls playing [largely non-contact] after school. But then you jump to high-school programming and above and it’s 40% female participation. So I definitely think that at that younger age there is a definite concern about safety and about the sport.

“But I think for those who get to know rugby, they get to understand that the tackling is different [to American football]. For outsiders, the emphasis gets to be on ‘collision, collision’, but you talk to someone like [English sevens great and Serevi board member] Ben Gollings and he will tell you it’s game of evasion.

If it comes down to you and another person and you have no pads and no helmet, are you going to run into that person or are you going to look for space on the field?

Prentice and others like her believe there is space on the field for women’s rugby. Development programmes, run by the likes of Serevi and the charity Play Rugby USA, are bringing the game to schools in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The game has also been embraced by an increasing number of colleges.

“So far, we have seen smaller, regional schools pick up [women’s] rugby as a varsity sport in an effort to help distinguish themselves,” says Karen Fong Donoghue, owner and founder of college rugby advisory consultancy The Rugger’s Edge, citing the likes of Notre Dame College in Ohio, Pennsylvania’s West Chester University and Norwich, in Vermont.

Asked if the women’s game has a chance of becoming a major college sport in the near future, Fong Donoghue says: “Seeing that women’s rugby has been an emerging NCAA sport for well over seven years and has yet to meet the requirements to be an actual NCAA sport, we are going to need a lot more support and interest from colleges to make it a reality.

My best guess? At least five more years – or a medal at the Olympics in 2016.

Making it to Rio is of profound importance. In Dubai, the first tournament of six that make up the World Rugby Women’s Sevens Series, the US are drawn with New Zealand and two nations less famous for rugby but very familiar with Olympic success: Russia and China. A top-four finish on the series books a place in Brazil – the US managed that in 2012-13 but fell to seventh last time out. Miss the top four and the Eagles will be sent into regional qualifying, wherein the presence or otherwise of rivals (and rising power) Canada would do much to determine their chances of success.

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The players who will begin the attempt to qualify for Rio work at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California. In his search for talent, coach Ric Suggitt has cast his net wide. Elana Meyers, an Olympic bobsleigh medalist, trained with the team this year; the squad for Dubai includes former Western Oregon basketball players Melissa Fowler and Lorrie Clifford and a star of field hockey and American football, Jessica Javelet.

“We have good athletes that are pretty confident,” said Suggit, on announcing his squad. “But what we lack is that consistency in international competition. I don’t think they’re fully aware of the pressure yet. I think they’ll feel it when they start to play.”

Such crossover talent, attracted to rugby by its Olympic status, represents an immediate development pathway. The work being done at the grass roots by Serevi, USA Rugby and others represents another, longer view.

“The US development squad recently went to Fiji for the Coral Coast Sevens and competed at a fantastic level,” says Prentice. “Some of them were crossover athletes. You always want to look to a wide variety of sports.

“But ideally down the road you get the rugby opportunities for kids, so there are better entry points on the development pathway earlier and then there will be more experience in the sport as a whole.”

Prentice is hopeful that converts will keep coming. “I think women and girls are really drawn to rugby,” she says. “I think girls are sometimes frustrated by some of the more mainstream sports, because there really is no opportunity to be physical. Sometimes they can be penalised in soccer for being too aggressive or just outside the norm of how a girl should be on the field.

“So I think there is this pent-up desire for an option for girls to play such a sport, and there is a generation of girls looking for an opportunity.”

If all goes well on the road to Rio, that opportunity could soon be upon them.