Baby Alice poses with the stars of the 2016 Olympics during their nationwide tour following the silver medal finish.
I have recently been co-writing a piece for Scrum Queens about rugby’s first steps into professionalism (part one should drop next week). It’s been interesting to be working on this topic against a backdrop of retirement announcements. First was Portia Woodman-Wickliffe and now Tyla King has confirmed that Paris will be her last tournament in the black jersey.
It’s interesting because with any retirement there comes a retrospective. In the women’s game, this is often couched within markers of progress. Both Woodman-Wickliffe and King were foundational members of the band of players that became known as the Sevens Sisters. This group launched professional women’s rugby in this country. They were the first to earn a liveable wage, to become household names and to be marketable in their own right.
I will never forget the way the promotional material started to shift after these stars broke through. Suddenly, the Black Ferns Sevens players weren’t just ticking the box alongside the men, they were the draw card. They were the ones front and centre of posters. Something I never thought I would see.
Boomerangs that they were, their influence spilled over into the longer form of the game. Their involvement in season one of Aupiki helped bring first time contracted players up to speed on expectations. You could argue part of the success of the Rugby World Cup 2021 was due to the prior establishment of Sarah Hirini, Portia Woodman-Wickliffe, Theresa Setefano, Stacey Waaka and Ruby Tui as fan favourites.
And then of course, there is the contract structure. Unlike men’s rugby in this country which is afforded some discretion within the confines of a salary cap, women’s rugby players are paid on a relatively transparent tiered rate. This structure was carried across from sevens contracts. As the men’s rugby alternative requires an investment into Super Rugby wages that just isn’t coming for us any time soon.
So much of the progress we have seen across our game in the last decade has been led by sevens. How is it then that we have allowed the hollowing out the structure that this team sits upon? Takeaway these foundational players like Woodman-Wickliffe and King and the whole thing starts looking pretty shaky.
A sidebar here for Kelly Brazier. While we have seen announcements of Woodman-Wickliffe and King’s decision to step away, Brazier appears to have had that decision made for her. She was named unceremoniously in the non-travelling reserves for this Olympic Games. This was after Brazier made plain her intention to chase her “perfect ending” with one last hurrah in Paris.
It’s a stretch but perhaps that ending could come in England instead. We are still criminally under resourced at 10 in the Black Ferns 15s side. So I wouldn’t say no to picking up a two time World Cup winner. The pace of the sevens game may have run away from her but that rugby mind is in it’s prime. Bunts, make the call.
Don’t get me wrong, I have every faith that the current crop of players that will rise to fill their boots. What concerns me is where the players beyond them will come from.
Both Woodman-Wickliffe and King were involved in the 2012 Go for Gold programme. The nationwide talent search New Zealand Rugby had to deploy after cutting women’s sevens from it’s programming a decade earlier. Will we see another reboot of this initiative for Los Angeles 2028? We may need to now as domestic women’s sevens hasn’t existed in New Zealand since 2020.
It used to be that summer was when sevens kicked off. You would have club sevens in October which would lead to the selection of a provincial side. This team would then compete in a Regional tournament held before Christmas and winners would head to Nationals early in the New Year.
Alongside this, between 2018 to 2020, Ignite Sevens was held. This was a talent ID tournament for players under the age of 23. It had more of a Go for Gold vibe as it was explicitly targeting code hoppers alongside players with promise. Which I mean, wouldn’t you when the last time you did that you bagged Woodman-Wickliffe??
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But then Covid shut everything down. And when the restrictions lifted, sevens didn’t come back.
The only part of the game that remained was Condor Sevens. This is the tournament played by high schoolers in Aotearoa. Is it any wonder then that virtually all new players in recent years were signed to the team as teenagers.
For ambitious sevens players in Aotearoa now, your plan is make the Black Ferns Sevens team by age 18. Failing that, there is no plan B on our shores. The only other option is the path Tysha Ikenasio took, playing professionally in the Japanese sevens league.
What this reveals, yet again, is New Zealand Rugby’s inability to plan for the women’s game. For years, they invested in sevens, while ignoring fifteens. Now they are employing the opposite. Fifteens is taking all of their attention and they’ve forgotten all about sevens. They relied on the talent within the women’s game to bridge this gap in their vision, successfully transitioning between the long and short formats to keep the trophy cabinet full.
Sevens as it’s operating right now is not going to keep producing champions for New Zealand. That they have got so much mileage out of one player group recruited in 2012 is more luck than anything else. You cannot expect sevens athletes to give you 10 years of service, even if you recruit them as teenagers. The demands of the sport are not conducive with that level of high performance for that long.
It should be expected therefore, that the average career of a Black Ferns Sevens player will shorten significantly after the final retirement of this first wave. Which means you need to have a strong pool of talent to draw from to maintain their legacy. High School being the only onramp to the international stage is farcical. Had that been the story prior to 2016 we wouldn’t have picked up influential players like Woodman-Wickliffe or Niall Williams-Guthrie.
Even Jorja Miller, one of the outstanding young talents that has successfully made this jump could easily have been missed. We are lucky that her whānau could support her move from small town Timaru to Christchurch Girls High School to chase her rugby dream. If she hadn’t moved, there would be no guarantee she would have been seen by our system. How many more Millers are there our in our regions? Or in schools without rugby teams that are missing their shot.
The way in which talent has flowed between formats for pinnacle events, as fifteens got it’s house in order, is unlikely to be replicated the other way. It is true that we have a seemingly unending stream of loose forward and outside back talent that could fit the player profile. But just look at the men’s game and you see our impending reality. When both parts are professionalised, the transition between formats is harder to negotiate.
I feel like I have been writing some version of this for the last three years but talent must be met with opportunity in order to achieve success. Our failure to orchestrate those opportunities for our women playing sevens, will be our failure to recruit talent that keeps us on top.
With you,
Alice