Rachel feels there should be more support for clubs
Wicklow RFC
RACHEL GRIFFEY is on a mission to play rugby for Leinster and Ireland, though she’s not too happy with the IRFU’s attitude towards smaller clubs like Wicklow RFC. If she could click her fingers in the morning and change one thing it would be the IRFU.
“I feel like they don’t listen enough to women and communicate enough with us in terms of what will get us to matches. Obviously we have to take responsibility as well but the IRFU could reach out and bring clubs like Wicklow up instead of focussing on the Dublin clubs where all the Leinster and Irish players come from.
“They should be looking at how they can get someone on the panel. We’ve very little support from the IRFU, no schemes have come in, nobody asks us how we’re doing. At least even for them to ask how they can improve a team like Wicklow and how to raise the standard.”
She started to play rugby when she was ten, one of only two girls on the boy’s team. While her presence turned a few heads in the town, Wicklow RFC has one of the largest women’s sections in the country, boasting around 130 girls and women taking to the field. The club provides a huge level of support for them, treating them just like their male counterparts.
She was captain of the adult team last year which went through the season in both league and cup unbeaten and gained promotion into Division 2. It was the first year the club had an adult women’s team having begun at underage level six years ago.
A club trip to Toronto last year for the U18 and adult teams not only helped to promote the club and earn messages from Irish Head Coach Joe Schmidt, it also minimised the number of players who stepped away from the game.
“I think it was the main foundation for us getting such a successful ladies team together. A lot of us when we went on the tour had just finished the Leaving Cert and there were a few girls considering, ‘if I went up to Maynooth [for university] I wouldn’t travel down to Wicklow’, but once they went on the tour they just bonded so well that they wanted to stay.”
The same applied to the older members of the team who, after a few attempts to set up an adult team, had begun to lose faith but the tour really galvanised the connection between the players.
Given she and the team have been quite successful, Rachael finds it difficult to pinpoint many bad moments with the club, though a torn ACL robbed her of seven months.
In contrast, captaining her club to success and winning the Youth Player of the Year award, the first girl to win it, come in behind her best moment with the club when her father Ronan won a trophy last year at the club’s awards night for his contribution to women’s rugby.
He is the women’s co-ordinator and the U18s coach this year and has been involved with the women and girl’s section of the club since the start.
“It was so great to see it recognised”, says Rachael. “It was a lovely speech to show how much he had done for the women’s game. He wasn’t there so I had to collect it for him.
“It was a very proud moment, my two sisters also play and we got to share that moment.