Rugby side built for golden run
Ghislaine Landry plays big. She has no choice. At five-foot-four, she’s been told —repeatedly — that she’s too short and too light for the rough sport of rugby.
“I choose to prove them wrong,” the 27-year-old said.
This season she was the top scorer in the World Rugby Women’s Sevens Series, helped Canada qualify for the Olympic debut of the sport in Rio, and was instrumental in the team’s first-ever tournament win in Amsterdam last month.
“We learned some lessons the hard way, but hopefully they’ll benefit us in July.” GHISLAINE LANDRY CANADIAN RUGBY SEVENS PLAYER
So, that shows them, doesn’t it? “A little bit.” Quiet success, it seems, is more Landry’s style than shouting from the rafters. That’s a lot like the team itself. They have become one of the best in the world at this fast-growing and fast-paced version of rugby while, mostly, flying under the radar here at home. The Pan Am Games team announced Wednesday has several standouts with Jen Kish, Ashley Steacy and Landry.
But with just seven players, teamwork and a shared vision of the game is vital. The players, who live and train year-round in Victoria, are particularly close and say that’s an advantage.
“The effort that everybody puts in is amazing because, on this team, you want to do it for the person beside you,” said 19-year-old Hannah Darling, the youngest player picked.
While continued success is what they all want for the person beside them, (and, no doubt, just a little bit for themselves) a step towards achieving that in Toronto next month may have come from one of their biggest failures.
In April, at a heavily promoted tournament in the Victoria suburb of Langford, B.C. – the home of Canadian rugby – the squad finished a disappointing sixth, their worst result of the world series season.
“There was a lot of hype and we slipped up,” head coach John Tait said, noting the pressure of playing in front of family and friends. “There were a lot of good individual performances, but we didn’t click.”
They’ll face even more pressure here in Toronto, but this time they say they’ll be ready for it. The two-day Pan Am tournament runs alongside the men’s competition over the first weekend, marking the debut of women’s sevens in a multi-sport Games. With the Olympics only a year away, it’s an important opportunity for Rugby Canada to draw attention to the sport, which is obsessively followed in other parts of the world but not here at home.
Since Canada and the U.S. are the only Pan Am entries ranked in the top six worldwide, the Canadians will be expected to make it to the gold medal match and, with the home crowd cheering, win it.
“There’s a lot of hype going around a home tournament and everybody talks about it beforehand . . . but until you actually go through it, I don’t think any kind of preparation will really prepare you for that,” said Landry, who hails from Toronto. “Sometimes when you win you don’t take the time to reflect. We learned some lessons the hard way, but hopefully they’ll benefit us in July.”
The Langford tournament is team shorthand for mistakes made and not to be repeated. The Amsterdam competition, which came a month later, is the reverse — not just because they won, but how.
“We’ve lost some games — big games — in the last minute a few too many times,” Landry said.
In the Amsterdam final against Australia, it seemed possible that was how the story would end again, as the teams traded the lead back and forth. Canada trailed with just a minute and half to go. Then, Landry evaded several defenders and scored the try that put Canada in the lead. On the next play, team captain Kish made sure they kept it.
It was a perfect way to end the season, Magali Harvey said.
Harvey, who plays both sevens and 15-a-side rugby, worked her way back onto the sevens team after being dropped earlier in the season. She is best known for her spectacular try at the rugby 15s World Cup in Paris last year. In a tense semifinal, with the Canadians in trouble in a scrum on their own try line, her teammates managed to free the ball and she ran 90 metres, dodging French players along the way, to score.
That try showed the Quebec City native has the speed for sevens, but she struggled with the tactics and didn’t always make the best decisions on the pitch. At the same time, other players — there are some 24 training full-time in Victoria, with only 12 named to each tournament team — were improving.
“I had to step it up if I wanted to keep making selections,” Harvey said. “It was a good wakeup call.”
Now, this team is looking to win Pan Am gold and get the nation excited about rugby before Rio.