Try Try Try

Good morning, Ruggers!

At 9:30am today, the US Women’s Rugby team will play New Zealand in the first semi-final of the tournament. While New Zealand is absolutely expected to win this game (they’re the best team in the world), the U.S.’s presence in the semi-final means that that the team will play for a medal, regardless of the outcome. No matter what, this is the highest the US Women’s Sevens team will finish ever at the Olympics and have the chance to match their best performance at the Rugby Sevens World Cup (3^rd in 2009 and 2013).

Both of my sisters played rugby in college (their respective teams even went to the national championships) and competitive club and select-side rugby in the years after. I was the “delicate one” (something they actually called me, which—fair) so I watched them from the sidelines. I saw my sister Naomi (whose former college teammate, Emilie Bydwell, is the current Olympic coach) stick a tampon into her bleeding nose and then continue playing, stiff-arming a girl who fully bounced off of her hand and fell backwards. I watched my sister Srob distribute the ball cleanly as a scrum-half before getting tackled by someone legitimately four times their size. And when the other team got the ball, I watched Srob (5’3”) bring that same player down, all 6’5” of her (at least that’s how tall she seemed to me). (My sisters always told me: “hit low”.) To be clear, some version of this happened every time either of them played a match.

From my sisters’ experiences in the club rugby circuit, I know that rugby is not a well-funded sport in the United States (unlike in Australia and New Zealand, where rugby, both men’s and women’s, is a national pastime). Many of the 15s (the more “traditional”/”pure” version of rugby) national team players have other jobs and, depending on which club they played for, self-fund their travel to and from tournaments. Though the 7s players are full-time pro athletes, the investment in the sport was a long time coming, and not present until quite recently. Many of these players came up through a system where they had to fight for their worth. (The pro league in the United States, PR7s, was founded in 2021.) These players are incredible, not only for their superhuman strength and speed, but also for their ability to balance life demands while being and becoming world class athletes.

Women’s Rugby is finally having a “moment” at this Olympics. The number of in-person spectators for the women’s matches have been essentially the same as their male counterparts. Ilona Maher, a player for the US team, has a very popular social media presence, with 1.6 million TikTok followers, and 1.4 million on Instagram. (Please watch her TikTok where she responds to a troll who tries to disparage her weight and size.)  Because of rugby’s relative lack of presence in youth sports, many of the athletes on the US team didn’t even start playing rugby until after college (a rarity among Olympians in their respective sports). Kristi Kirshe, for example, played soccer in college and didn’t start playing rugby until she was 23. Steph Rovetti was a college basketball player and, like Kirsche, didn’t start playing until her 20s.

Sevens is a fast game (and the US has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her player on their squad, Ariana Ramsey, who was also a dominant track athlete) --  two seven-minute halves, with seven players on each side covering an entire, full-sized Rugby pitch (typically 100m-long and 70m-wide).  Purist rugby fans will tell you that “true” rugby is 15s — which has much longer games, bigger [15 person] teams on the field, and a much larger scrum. For those unfamiliar with Rugby Sevens rules, USA Rugby has a good primer (the gist: players must run the ball across the opposite touchline [called a try] and can’t pass the ball forward).

If the US somehow beats New Zealand (currently ranked first in the world), they’ll play for gold against the winner of Canada and Australia (currently ranked second). If they lose (more likely), they’ll play the loser of the Canada-Australia game for Bronze. (Both matches will happen later today!) Regardless of what happens, the interest in, and media coverage of women’s rugby has clearly shifted at this Olympic – around the world and particularly in the United States. When she was growing up, US Captain Naya Tapper dreamed of playing football like her brother, eventually finding her way to rugby. I’d imagine that after these Olympics, more young girls will dream that they can grow up to become rugby players.