SCOTTISH RUGBY Chief Executive Mark Dodson and Chairman of the Board John Jeffrey have promised that supporting the women’s national team in their World Cup qualification bid will be a priority during the months ahead, as a key strand of an over-arching strategy currently being formulated within Murrayfield to help develop the women’s game at all levels.
Scotland’s dramatic win over Ireland on Saturday evening booked a spot in a final World Cup qualification tournament expected to be played in Dubai in January. They will compete against Samoa, Colombia and one of Japan, Kazakhstan and Hong Kong for a chance to go the global get-together in October.
If they make it to the main event, they will be the first Scottish team to reach the Finals since 2010, which would be an achievement with potential game-changing consequences in terms of boosting the profile and standard of the women’s game in this country.
SRU AGM: clubs vote against scrapping Super6
Premiership leaderboard for weekending 26th September
Super6 Leaderboard – after eight rounds
Given that the women’s game in Scotland is essentially amateur, Jeffrey – speaking on Sunday, immediately after the SRU’s AGM – acknowledged that finding a way to minimise the sacrifice players have to make in order to represent their country is an issue which needs to be addressed immediately.
“It is important that we resource as much as we can to the women ahead of that final qualifier in January,” he said.“They are going to have take another three weeks off [work] to go to the tournament and they are going to build up to the tournament as well. It is a huge, huge ask for these girls.”
Meanwhile, Dodson pointed that it is not simply a case of throwing cash at the players, because in many cases the money on offer won’t be enough to justify squad members either leaving or taking a sabbatical from their current job.
“We’ve got to look at each of their situations,” he explained. “Some of those girls are accountants or vets, and they are not going to swap out of one career where they are established, to come and play professional sport when they maybe only have two or three years left.
“So, there’s the excitement around the women’s game but also the reality that we haven’t caught up to that point where a lot of women feel they can choose that career.
“It is not like women’s soccer where, now that big clubs are involved and money is coming in, women are choosing that career over careers they had before. Rugby is not there yet.
“I think some will [take the chance to play full-time], and if we feel it is the right thing to do and the girls are the right age, then this is the type of thing we will take forward.”
Season Appeal 2022 - 2023
We hope you are enjoying our unrivalled coverage of Scottish Rugby. While mainstream media continues to reduce its interest in the rugby family in Scotland, The Offside Line does its very best to make sure all levels of the domestic game are reported.
Our commitment to the game and sharing its stories means that we do not have a paywall, so we would ask you (only if you can!) to support The Offside Line, either with a one off donation, or with a monthly contribution.
We have been keeping Scottish rugby in the news since 2016 and will have 3 million page views this year, making The Offside Line first for Scottish rugby.
When Scottish Rugby unveiled its strategy document for the next three years back in June, its three key strands wereL ‘well-being’, ‘winning’ and ‘women’. At the time, Dodson promised that a more detailed plan for the women’s game would be developed and published by “sometime in the Autumn”. That has not been delivered yet, but the Chief Executive promised that it remains an important work in progress.
“It is being written at the moment, and being worked on, and when it is ready it will come out,” he said. “It will cover everything from player acquisition at school from four years onwards through to the professional player. The problem is that it is like a jigsaw where we have certain pieces, but we don’t have others, so we are trying to build those missing pieces to get an overall picture.”
“It is not like we can just concentrate on the top end, or the bottom end, or some point in between – we’ve got multiple problems.”
Earlier in the day, during his presentation to the AGM, Dodson had spoken at length about the women’s game.
“I want to make a direct appeal to everyone in the room today to make sure your club directly addresses the issues facing the women’s game,” he’d said. “We’ll be investing significantly in the game across Scotland, but we need every club across the country to open its doors to women and girls.
“There is a need to build facilities or refurbish existing facilities to welcome them into your club.
“World Rugby, Six Nations, EPCR and the British and Irish Lions are all looking at ways in which the women’s game can be professionalised and expanded. Naturally, we are close to that debate, however we have far greater issues with our grassroots game and at school-age level.
“We are continuing to work on our overarching strategy for the women’s game and our thinking is bound to be influenced by the work undertaken at international and professional level.
““We will engage with the RFU to begin talks around any potential involvement in the English professional league. They’re keen that the Celtic nations don’t fall too far behind England and France, and globally Canada and New Zealand, and we’ll see where this leads.
“Essentially the work we are advancing now will take the next decade to fully roll out. Our ambition is to direct investment and support to our best players to retain parity with the best nations in the world while also outlining a plan to rebuild our player and club base from the bottom up.
“Whatever we do next has to be sustainable and realistic. However, it also has to be really ambitious as we see the sector of the game as a primary growth area for revenue and participation, as do most other European unions.
“But we can’t do this alone. We’ll need every club to be open to the idea of women’s and girls’ teams and that begins with a sincere welcome and is demonstrated by women being treated equally from day one.
“We plan to incentivise clubs that make the most progress and eventually look at professional teams under the umbrella of our pro teams in Glasgow and Edinburgh.”
Asked after the meeting if running a women’s version of Super6 might be an option, Dodson explained: “One of the problems is that the Super6 clubs are not in the areas where our players are, but you may end up having some kind of Super4.
“We’ll have to think about it and I don’t have the answers yet, and neither does Gemma [Fay – Head of Girls / Women’s Performance Rugby], Stevie [Gemmell – Scottish Rugby’s Technical Director] or Jim [Mallinder – Head of Performance Rugby]. What do you do to crystalise the players, to get them all in the same area and playing together in order to raise standards?
“One of the things we’ve talked about is regional training centres to give them the ability to be coached, and to do strength and conditioning, near where they live. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But when you have 30 women who live all over the UK it is quite hard. So, we have to think hard about how we do that, and that’s what we’re doing at the moment.”
Dodson and JJ will be supporting the Scottish Women, in Dubai, in January – you bet they’ll be there supporting them.
Interesting piece about Ireland. Would like to see the funding the IRFU puts in
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/58711103
It totals about €11 million for the last accounts in 2019.
That includes:
Women’s representative teams
Sevens
Under 20s
Age-grade teams
Academies
High performance unit
Men’s game gets €45 million
Thanks Grant
That’s a lot of money. Though I see Phil Doyle questioning how it’s been used between sevens and 15s
Yes it is….unfortunately they need more. There is no equivalency with the men’s game in terms of facilities and general attitude towards them. They had elite players changing next to bins for a game recently.
Its a big problem. Instead of having two distinct performance pathways they rob Peter to pay Paul. The men’s sevens in Ireland also have problems as its usually guys who have been let go by clubs or provinces because they are “too small”. But the union want to keep them around….”just in case”. The Irish men that went to the Olympics did that with very little mainstream support. One of our clubs own Hugo Lennox was on the team.
This is good news and kudos to Mark and John for making these commitments.
As Pegj has said, these issues were flagged several years ago. I recall that increasing womens participation was a central plank of Sheila Begbies first strategy. The facilities issue was flagged then. It’s all very well calling on clubs to improve facilities. How will they do that? Can the facilities be improved to be co-ed? Or will they need replaced? And of course where will the money come from?
Dodson is backing the Women’s team. Another handicap for them to overcome then.
What’s needed is at grass roots level, a cultural change needs to happen, and the view of rugby by most young girls and women needs to change. Equality for our women’s teams is a good start. Its the same in every union…treat ALL players equally and you will start to see real change.
Keep the blazers out of it and ask the women’s players across the game what they really want. Use that information to form the strategy, which should be led by a woman who has played the game and understands the barriers.
Instead of creating the hullaballoo around the men’s game with Super 6, Mark Dodson should have realised that it’s the Womens game that needed a radical rethink.
Some of the Super 6 time, effort and money should have been put in that direction, whilst a top of the men’s game alternative strategy should have been built in conjunction with the Clubs.
Clubs have been crying out for help for several years with facilities and the need to grow the game, but it has generally fallen on deaf ears as the Executive followed their pet projects (Agenda 3, Super 6, bar best practice workshops, etc.), but now Mr Dodson thinks we need to look at growing the game and improving facilities – welcome to the party (10 years after you were sent invitations).
Good common sense approach from Mr Dodson. Bottom up approach is always the best when trying to grow any sport. We do need to professionalise the women’s game in Scotland but as always the devil is in the detail and it’s important not to make an arse of it like they did when the men’s game went pro.
The women’s team deserves all the support they can get given what they achieved on Saturday and what is at stake for them.
Fully agree that building from the bottom up is the right approach – create a strong productive foundation at the base of the sporting pyramid….
So why so much eye-watering costly / unproductive top-down stuff throughout mainstream Scottish rugby, leaving the undernourished grassroots of the game struggling to survive, Mister C?
Wish I had an answer to that, Ron. The reality is that outwith England and France pretty much all the teams are Union owned franchises and I would wager that precious few are profit making. Until rugby becomes a true ‘people’s game’ and can attract the crowds to make teams sustainable then I’m afraid the top down approach is here to stay.
Perhaps some clubs could do more engagement in their local communities and perhaps that would lead to more money flowing into the clubs. There’s a lot union can learn from rugby league when it comes to establishing a true bond between clubs and their local communities.
That’s my tuppenceworth anyway.