Celebrating women's and girls' rugby all in one afternoon
Gosford All Blacks recently had their biggest ever afternoon of women's and girls' rugby. Philippe Peirsegaele, Chair of GAB, explains how the day went and some of the logistics behind the success.
On Sunday 3rd November we had our biggest afternoon ever of women and girls rugby at Gosford All Blacks. For the first time in our history we had all our girls’ teams and our women’s team playing at home at the same time.
We have a long and rich tradition of girls’ rugby at Gosford All Blacks. In recent years we added a womens team. It is good to look back at all the incremental steps we have taken along the way and see how much the club has accomplished.
We regularly celebrate achievements of individual teams but it is amazing to celebrate together and see that we are all part of a big rugby family.
The girls matches were National Cup and Bucks Invitational League games. All the games were 15-a-side games.
The Womens team competes in the RFU's Inner Warrior league for new and developing teams.
This league allows substantial changes to the formats of the game to suit developmental needs of different teams. This time however both teams had enough experienced players to play a full 15-a-side game.
All our games kicked off at the same time except the U14 game so we got as many people there to kickstart the afternoon.
I have been involved with the organisation of the le Plaisir du Mouvement (LPM) Camps in Oxfordshire. One of the brilliant things they do is a series of exhibition games for parents on the last day. All the players from teams not involved with the game form a large guard of honour. This builds a tremendous atmosphere for the players.
The logistics
We have 4 pitches so we had a lot of flexibility on that front. Our bottlenecks were the car park and the capacity of the clubhouse.
We had to schedule the games to allow the car park to clear from the late morning Mini & Junior session.
We also had to move the youngest age group through the clubhouse to have the space to seat 6 teams from the other games. So the u14 kicked off at 13:00 and all other games at 14:00.
We have 7 team changing rooms and two referee changing rooms. We made one referee changing room for female refs and another male refs only.
One club had an U14 and U16 team so they shared one of the larger changing rooms and this worked because the games were staggered.
For anyone thinking of running something similar, my advice would be: just do it. Like all events at rugby clubs, use the "car to bar" principle.
Think about the journey for everyone attending your event from the moment they arrive in their car to the moment they relax at the bar after the game.
So: car park marshalls, changing rooms, toilets, pitches, changing rooms, food, volunteers and all the normal match day needs: refs, physios, veo, your club's medical action plan etc.
If we were to run it again we could grow and have more teams, turn it into a festival, combine it with a members lunch, involve the girls from the minis and juniors for more guards of honour.
We could also invite the local community for taster sessions, or get the media at the club. There are so many ideas and only 52 weekends in a year.
There were some challenges, including convincing the team managers that it would all work and be flawless!
Managing food for more than 120 players was also a challenge with our regular volunteers, so we outsourced that to a local catering company with links to the club. We also hired a videographer to document the day which was a first for us.
The buzz around the club was palpable all day. The video captures this brilliantly.
Video credit: Josh Le Feuvre
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