‘My fighting students could end up playing for Wales’
Full-back Elinor Snowsill tells Kate Rowan about taming troublesome girls through a love of rugby
Elinor Snowsill’s reaction to being asked about an accident of birth meaning that she plays as an amateur for Wales while today’s opponents England are professionals is not what you expect. She erupts into laughter: “I was born in England.”
Such is the profile of the women’s game that details such as Snowsill having been born in Ascot, Berkshire, to a Welsh mother and English father are not widely known in the same way that say Jonathan Davies, who started for the men yesterday, was born in the West Midlands.
With more laughter, the Bristol Bears woman, who starts at full-back at Cardiff Arms Park, recounts how her mother, Nerys, “a passionate Welsh woman”, hampered any chance of her daughter playing for England as she was appalled when a seven-yearold Snowsill expressed her displeasure at having to speak Welsh.
“I told her I was going to stop answering her in Welsh because no one speaks it around it here, what’s the point?” she says. “That was the moment when she decided to move the whole family to Cardiff and put me into Welsh education. I had to do all my exams through Welsh and learn the language pretty well.”
The 29-year-old returns to the question of envy of the English women’s professional status and explains her views would be different if she were 10 years younger. “It would be amazing to be professional from a young age, maybe if I was coming into the sport at the age of 20 now maybe I would be [looking at England] but at the age I am at now, it would mean I wouldn’t have my job and, as silly as that sounds, I love my job and it is important to me.”
It takes only a few moments listening to Snowsill speaking about her job working for the charity School of Hard Knocks, with secondary school students using rugby as a tool for personal and academic development, to realise that she defines herself just as much by that work as she does playing for Wales.
She relates an anecdote of going into a Cardiff school where she was charged with taking a group of girls with particularly challenging behaviour. “The girls didn’t fear any consequences, they were calling the head teacher all the names under the sun. The one thing they did enjoy was rugby, they love rugby, they got us in to work with them at the start of this academic year and the first session was a nightmare,” she says.
“We had 16 of them in the group and six were having fights with each other, so we ended the session with eight kids and one of the girls announced, ‘that all went pear-shaped’.”
Despite these challenges and difficult family circumstances experienced by some of the students, Snowsill believes she may have unearthed some future Wales internationals.
“There are two girls there who definitely have the
potential to play for Wales. One girl has a really difficult background, she has one parent in jail, but since we have started working with her, we have seen a huge turn-around in her attitude, she is knuckling down more in lessons.
“She still has problems, she is not perfect, but she is completely on board now because she is really focused on her goal of playing for Wales.”
Although Snowsill has found a career that will take her into life post-rugby, she, like many female players, struggled to find the right balance. Having qualified to teach psychology, she set up her own business selling healthy takeaway food but had to change direction due to her rugby commitments.
“If I wasn’t playing for Wales, I would have carried on with the business,” she says. “It got to the point where I needed something that would bring in money when I worked for it, rather than with a business where you work for four days and get one day’s pay.”
Snowsill may have made peace with not becoming a professional but, after Wales lost 52-0 in last year’s Six Nations encounter at the Stoop, she is acutely aware of how uneven the playing field is in international women’s rugby.
“It is very challenging and I think the results and scores over the last few years have shown that. It is just one of those situations where you are complete underdogs but that doesn’t mean you should write anything off,” she says.
“Even though they are professional, they have a lot of time to recover, they are still human and they are under a lot of pressure. I do think that professionalism brings a lot more pressure to perform.
“A lot of the game is psychological. It is making sure we go into the game with no fear, front up physically and not be afraid to make mistakes.”