Rugby ladies on the rise

Hackney Rugby Club Ladies

It has typically been viewed as an elite, middle class sport, reserved for the affluent, the wealthy and, above all, the boys. But try telling that to the ladies of Hackney Rugby Club. They might just choose to disagree with you.

Hackney Ladies is a fledgling ladies club, having gone from a mere four members at the beginning of this season to a respectable fourteen in a matter of weeks.

The team burst into being thanks to the initiative of its four founding members, all local rugby fans. Having tried out other local women’s clubs, which they found to be disappointingly cliquey with squad positions already set in stone, the girls took matters into their own hands. They approached the boys at Hackney RFC.

Now your average rugby boy tends to display as much enthusiasm for the women’s game as he might for a Sex and the City DVD box set. At Hackney, however, they appear to breed a different type of rugby man, because the reaction the girls received was refreshingly and instantaneously positive. “By the second week they’d assigned us a coach even though there were only four of us,” says team captain Emma Middleton. “All of them were telling their friends and sisters about it”.

The first joint training proved even more of a surprise, when the men and women’s teams played an entire game of touch rugby together. Rugby boys, often immoveable in their dismissal of their female counterparts, will often resist with donkey-like stubbornness any efforts to make them integrate. Not so in Hackney.

“They were pulling boys off the pitch to put us in positions. Can you imagine how many rugby boys there are out there that wouldn’t kick up a fuss at being taken off the pitch? Or in fact to play touch rugby with girls?” points out Middleton.

She is quick to stress that Hackney Ladies are in it for the long run. Women’s squads, despite an initially glorious couple of years, often fall apart when the core nucleus of the team move on to pastures new. Hackney hope not to suffer the same fate thanks to their close contact with the local community which helps them to unearth local talent. “Hopefully what’s going to be different about Hackney is that they develop a youth girls’ team as well, which really taps into local schools and local places,” says Middleton.

The club already boasts a ladies youth side, with over fifteen girls currently training, all potential stars of tomorrow for the women’s team. The membership of the club, both men and women, is as diverse as you’d expect from a borough like Hackney. Rather than a cliquey old boys’ network, the club is made up of “proper Hackney people with proper Hackney stories,” says Middleton. Crucially, it is one of the few clubs to boast a relative level of ethnic diversity, smashing the image of a stuffy elitist rugby player. “I think it defies the stereotypes of rugby and I think it’s got a real community around it,” she adds.

For now, the future of Hackney’s ladies’ side looks pleasingly positive, with ever increasing membership and a handful of important friendlies in the pipe line. Moreover, Middleton is clear that it will be a side open to everyone, without any sort of ideal or typical ‘Hackney player’. “There is going to be no stereotypical Hackney rugby player. Absolutely definitely not,” she says. “Hopefully we’ll just have a completely random mix of people, which I think is what Hackney is.”

As in rugby, so in life. That might not be such a bad philosophy after all.

Hackney RFC’s men/women/junior sides train 7.30 to 9.30 every Tuesday at Spring Hill.