‘It’s inevitable that women will coach men’
Annick Hayraud is confident females will make it to the very top, writes Charlotte Harpur
Women’s Six Nations coaches
Annick Hayraud is in a unique position in this Six Nations: amazingly, she is the only woman on the senior coaching staff of any side in either the men’s or women’s tournament.
The France women’s head coach is adamant the game has moved on a long way since her own playing days, and as she describes how she had to pay for her own tracksuit, stay in youth hostels and take annual leave from her job in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that certainly rings true.
But while female players are now on a slightly more even footing with men, the same cannot be said in coaching. Women are involved behind the scenes but, with the exception of Hayraud, they have roles such as team manager, kit manager, analyst, physio and media manager.
The 52-year-old believes the situation is ripe for change. “In a couple of years there will be more women leading teams, whether that be boys or girls,” she says. “Is it a worry? I don’t think so. Women’s rugby is still young. Perhaps because of that there are not a lot of women who look after the teams but I believe that there is, at the federation level, increased female participation.”
But it is certainly an issue the Rugby Football Union is aware of. “Gender balance is key – we want men coaching women, women coaching men and ultimately we need more coaches across the game, so we are trying to open the opportunities up to increase the pool of people we are pulling from,” a spokesperson said.
World Rugby has also cited coaching as “a key pillar” of its 2017-25 strategic plan and commissioned a review in August 2018 “to develop a more in-depth understanding of the status of women coaching rugby at highperformance level globally, assessing the barriers to entry”.
In the top women’s domestic rugby divisions, only three coaches in France are female, although there are 13 in England.
Hayraud is proof for other women that coaching is a legitimate career. Her visibility is crucial, for you cannot be what you cannot see. This has most recently been embodied by Katie Sowers of the San Francisco 49ers, the first woman to coach in a Super Bowl, who said: “I always knew I wanted to coach, but I didn’t know I could coach in the NFL until I saw Becky Hammon become a coach in the NBA.”
It is not just rugby where the number of female coaches remains low. In the past four Olympic Games, 10 per cent of accredited coaches were women, according to the 2018 International Olympic Committee gender equality report. This issue has an effect; the Youth Sport Trust’s “Girls Active” scheme recently revealed that just eight per cent of girls had coaching roles either inside or outside schools, even though 34 per cent had a desire to coach.
And yet in sports where women are coaches, they are extremely successful. Ninety-seven per cent of all international women’s football tournaments have been won with a female head coach; three out of the four 2017 women’s tennis grand slams were won by a player coached by a woman; the most successful gymnast of all times, Simone Biles, was coached by Aimee Boorman for 12 years.
The key is measures being put in place at grass-roots level to allow female coaches to develop, which the RFU insists is taking place.
“With the introduction of the Tyrrells Premier 15s [England’s top women’s rugby division] and the awarding of central contracts for women, it was felt important to grow the number of female coaches going through the levelthree and level-four coaching awards,” an RFU spokesperson said. “The RFU identified a number of high-profile, former female players and coaches and put a programme in place to support them pre, during and post the qualification. This approach resulted in 18 current or former Red Roses players enrolled on level three and level four.”
It is promising that Hayraud thinks women will coach teams of both genders in years to come, but progress so far has been slow.