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(Photo by Ed Hagerty)
by Alex Goff
In 2005 the IRB was chastened. Rugby did not receive what many felt was an automatic “Yes” vote to put the sport into the Olympics. What had happened.
IRB CEO Mike Miller spelled out the facts a few months later in a small press conference at the 2006 USA 7s. Rugby had not embraced the spirit of Olympism to the right degree. But most of all, rugby had ignored the women.
Did they have a 7s World Cup for women? No. Did they even mention women in their promotional materials? Not reall. Miller and the IRB knew what they had to do. They had to get serious about women's international 7s.
Now that rugby has been accepted into the Olympic Games, it’s fair to say that the IRB’s success is in part due to their support of the women’s game. Rugby would not be an Olympic sport without the women, and women would not have an international 7s presence were it not for one man – Emil Signes.
Signes pushed for years to get an international women's 7s circuit and a 7s World Cup. It took longer than he hoped, but he was clearly proud to see the event take place in 2009. Not only take place, but be held alongside with the men.
Here (Signes's own words in italics) is how it all happened:
On May 15, 1996, the US received an invitation to the 1997 Hong Kong Invitational Women's Rugby Sevens (HKIWRS), a tournament to which 16 national women's teams have been invited. Within a month we had accepted the invitation and I was appointed coach to the US national women's sevens team.
We now have put in place a program to select a national team, and are moving full speed ahead.
The next step in providing international women's sevens venues happened so much by accident that it still cracks me up to think about it. I found out exactly when it happened only in late June, when I read a May 1, 1996 article in the Eastern Express, a Hong Kong newspaper. It quoted Hong Kong's Maria Allen, who said, "The United States team were in Dubai and were asking about an international fixture . . . and it was probably from that we thought we could maybe have our own tournament."
Well, that "United States team ... were asking" would be me ... and this is how it happened. The US representative at the men’s Dubai Sevens in November 1995 was the invitational side Atlantis which I was coaching. We had to be at the airport at 6am on the day following the tournament, and were a bit the worse for wear. Next to us on the check-in lines were the Hong Kong Police women, who had won the women's bracket of the Dubai Sevens. They were in no better shape than we, maybe worse.
Having listened to USA women’s sevens coordinator Sallie Ahlert badger me for three years about finding a venue for US women All Stars to play, and having been seven times, as either coach or manager to the men Eagles, to the Hong Kong Sevens, where good sevens play is venerated, I put two and two together and realized that these Hong Kong women rugby players might represent an opportunity to expand the Hong Kong Sevens to women's teams.
I remember speaking to women's sevens chairperson Anne Marie O'Donoghue at the airport. I inquired about the possibility of the Hong Kong women driving an effort to use the success of the men’s Hong Kong Sevens to provide a venue for international women's sevens play (I was actually trying to lead them to find an arrangement where the US women could be involved in some kind of mini-tournament within "the" Hong Kong Sevens). I was amused to discover, via the Hong Kong press, that that was almost certainly the conversation that finally got the ball rolling.
A funny thing, coincidence.
The First International Women’s Sevens:
After a competitive first 10 minutes, in which New Zealand scored only on the first and last play, and a strong beginning to the second half, the US finally caved in to superior athleticism and the final score was not close. New Zealand averaged 2 points per minute or more in all its games, and they were worthy champions. Equally, we were clearly the second best team in the tournament, and our semifinal win over England was very exciting.
Twelve teams participated in the tournament. New Zealand and the USA were 5-0 in their pools. England and Hong Kong 2nd at 4-1.
In the Cup Semifinals New Zealand defeated Hong Kong 39-7, while in the much-anticipated match between the USA and England, the Eagles won 17-5, on two tries by Lisa Rowe and a try by Sue Parker.
Dianne Apiti scored 4 tries for New Zealand in the final and New Zealand were champions.
International Women’s Sevens at “the” Sevens.
When speaking with the Hong Kong women in 1995, I had hoped to get a women’s event associated with "the" Sevens. In a 1996 repeat of that request, the word was that the women’s time slot at the Sevens was for "Hong Kong women." While I was resigned to that fact this year, assistant coach and manager Al Caravelli was not, and he and New Zealand coach Darryl Suasua convinced those in charge that the Hong Kong Sevens represented a chance to market women’s rugby to the masses, and that it was in everyone’s best interest to put on an event showcasing the best that we could offer.
Most players had gone home, but there were quite a few good players remaining for the Sevens, and we put together a team of four New Zealanders (Anna Richards, Anna Rush, Maata Young and Monique Hiroranaa), three Americans (Anita Pease, Krista McFarren and Tracy Moens), one Australian (Libby Andrews), and Ruth Mitchell and Charlotte Cullen of Hong Kong to play in a “Hong Kong Women vs. the Rest of the World.”
The game was played at 9 AM Saturday, two hours before the first men’s match, but because of the queuing for seats, there were probably between 5,000 and 10,000 people already in the stands. The Rest of the World won handily, but that wasn’t the point: the way had been paved for future, bigger and better, women’s participation in the Hong Kong Sevens.
Still, this little made-up game was far from what we were looking for.
Post-script on this article: In this article I referenced a person I had convinced to help me with the program, Al Caravelli. Al came as assistant coach and manager and ended up helping me with all the programs with which I was associated, just as I now help him with the US men.
“Al,” I wrote, “brings a wealth of experience, intelligence, intensity, compassion and puts everything he has into every venture he undertakes. He was a vital cog in getting women’s rugby on the Hong Kong stadium turf in 1997.”
The Women’s World Cup of 1998 dropped the number of teams available for an international sevens event in Hong Kong and to the great sadness of Signes and the USA team, the women's event was canceled.
Some good came out of 1998, however: I attended the 1998 tournament as a journalist and had a long meeting with Dick Airth and Karen Robertson about the future of the tournament. I stressed that it would not only be in our interest but also in the interest of the tournament to have “some exposure” of the women to the fans at the Sevens. Maybe, I suggested, we could have the tournament the day before the men’s tournaments and have the semi-finals and finals, or at least the finals, take place in the Hong Kong Stadium during the men’s tournament.
Following the 1999 event, in which we did just that, I was touched when Dick Airth specifically credited that conversation as the catalyst for the integration of the women’s final with the men’s tournament. A summary of what I wrote at the time follows.
1999. USA Sevens Women Make the Big Time
Hong Kong, Friday, March 26, 1999. Playing in Hong Kong stadium during “the” Sevens in front of more than 20,000 people should be every ambitious rugby player’s dream. Very few, however, achieve this dream. Particularly women. That’s because, until now, there has never been a significant women’s game played at this venue.
1999, the 24th year of the Hong Kong Sevens, was the first year that an important women’s match was contested in the hallowed ground of the Hong Kong Stadium.
Our primary goal was to get to that final. And, with a convincing victory over a strong England team in the semifinals, we did it! That semifinal, incidentally, may well have been the first international rugby game in which identical twins – Jane and Emma Mitchell – competed against each other (Jane for the US and Emma for England).
In the finals, the US women gave New Zealand everything they could handle in the first half, holding them scoreless for the first seven minutes, and trailing only 0-5 at half time of the 20-minute game. The US, in fact, was within 10 meters of the NZ goal for an extended period, and in the end it was our offense and not our D, that was to let us down.
On the sidelines as US team mascot was 6-year-old Kristina Caravelli.
The fans raved about the game, and our players were recognized, and complimented, by dozens of fans as they left the stadium at the end of the evening. Furthermore, during the course of the next two days, several coaches, players, committee members and members of the media spoke to me with great admiration for the standard of play. Even commentator David Campese, who two years earlier had said women shouldn’t be playing rugby, spoke positively of the game, and talking with him made it obvious he had watched the whole thing.
New Zealand won the next 3 years, and in 2002 the IRB’s Jamie Scott attended the women’s banquet and outlined a plan that saw the women's World Cup 7s in 2005. Scott turned out to be 4-years premature, but, said Signes, "the handwriting never left the wall."
After that, the work kept getting done. Dubai held their tournament. The women's tournament in Hong Kong continued to grow, and when the USA 7s was started in 2004, there was always a women's presence. The USA didn't always win at the USA 7s, but they kept putting their handwriting on that wall, bringing in Canada, China, South Africa, England, and the New Zealand Maori.
At the 2009 USA 7s the USA v. England game ended in a tie. The men's tournament schedule was almost sacrosanct and there was no time to play overtime. IRB Chairman Bernard Lapasset didn't hesitate. "Play overtime" he said. So they did. Women's 7s had to have enough meaning to crown a chamion.
Signes:
The rest, as they say, is history. I left the women’s sevens position in 2005 (I had hoped to hang on till the first World Cup but 9 years was enough) and I’m now back with the US men’s coaching staff as video analyst. Nevertheless the US, and now the world’s, commitment to international women’s sevens goes on. The World Cup Sevens for women was not held in 2005, but it will go on in March of 2009 in Dubai in conjunction with the men’s Rugby World Cup Sevens at the same event. The dream of the US women’s rugby community 20 years ago, my dream, Emilito’s dream, will culminate in reality … it should be a great event!
And I am thrilled to have sowed the seed that reaped such a bountiful harvest.
I have spent my entire rugby career trying to get the men and women of rugby to appreciate each other; hopefully this event takes us along the desired path.
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