Photos courtesy of Girls Rugby Inc.
If Team USA women’s rugby player Ilona Maher’s 3.8 million Instagram followers weren’t proof enough that rugby is an up-and-coming sport for women, here’s another sign.
America’s only flag rugby for girls is making its way across the country, state by state, and it’s already here in Pennsylvania.
Girls Rugby Inc., led and co-founded by Erin Kennedy of Colorado, and propelled by Pennsylvania program director Lisa Kelly, is working to make rugby accessible at an earlier age than the college and adult levels women tend to start with. While there are other flag-level coed opportunities in certain regions, theirs is the only one that’s all for girls.
Kennedy believes sports, including rugby, can do more than bolster a young girl’s athletic skills. It can give her core values and leadership skills, too.
“They can empower themselves and apply that off the field as well,” Kennedy said.
Kelly has seen this firsthand in the Pennsylvania program. Before joining the Girls Rugby staff, she got her niece to join her local team.
“I could watch it through my niece’s eyes and see how it developed her as a different young lady,” Kelly said. “It made her more confident.”
Core Values
The Girls Rugby mission started as a way to fill a gap in athletic opportunities for girls.
Research shows that, at the high school level, girls have fewer opportunities to play sports than boys. This is particularly true for girls attending schools with primarily Black and Latino students because of the fewer resources these schools tend to have. Pennsylvania currently has four Girls Rugby teams that are working to fix that: Hershey, Halifax, Harrisburg and West Shore.
The Girls Rugby program works differently than other competitive youth sports organizations. Players between grades 2 to 8 can participate in a seven-week fall and spring season in what Kennedy considers a recreational style of sport.
“Each week, they’re getting their flag rugby skills, but then they’re getting these core values and leadership skills that we’re being very intentional about teaching,” she said.
They also don’t keep score, something that’s right for some girls more than others.
“We know that we’re not for everybody, but we’re such a great platform to either find a space that makes sense for you or just build some skills and then move into the next piece, which could be another sport, or it could be tackle or coed rugby,” Kennedy said.
Expansion Planned
Kelly has seen firsthand how girls respond well to this system.
She recalled a girl from a divorced family who had a hard time making it to practice and a hard time making friends once there. While it’s not exactly in her job description, Kelly made an effort to attend practices to help build the girl’s confidence, and she was able to help bring the team together enough for the girl to excel over the remaining four weeks of the season.
“She was the first one to sign up for our fall season, so I can’t wait to see her,” Kelly said.
For those girls who do want to get competitive, that’s still possible. Practices take place during the week, with games on weekends. For games, all four regions come together, and girls split up by grades to play amongst their peers.
Because there’s time between seasons, Girls Rugby offers off-season training camps and clinics for girls to try the sport out with less commitment than a full season. Kelly is also planning an adult fundraiser for parents of Pennsylvania Girls Rugby to take place at a local brewery. Details will be on the Facebook page for the coming November event.
For Kennedy, this is just the beginning of Girls Rugby, both as an organization and a sport.
She intends to expand the organization’s reach to new states and regions, something that will likely be possible as the U.S. prepares to host the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, where Team USA women’s rugby will vie for another medal, and subsequently the 2033 Women’s Rugby World Cup. In short, it’s going to be a good decade for women’s rugby, and Girls Rugby is ready to foster newfound interest in the sport in Pennsylvania and beyond.
“With a little bit of patience, you can teach a girl to catch a ball, you can teach her to drop kick a ball,” Kelly said. “A lot of our coaches who came from playing rugby in college and adulthood, they want to facilitate it to the younger girls.”
For more information on Girls Rugby, visit www.girlsrugbyinc.com and on Facebook at @girlsrugbypa.
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