We’ve come a long way, ladies April 28, 2009

Yesterday was the fairy tale end of a season, and the opening (hopefully) of a whole new chapter of rugby for Olney Ladies.
I’ve been playing for Olney for donkeys years, since I was 18 (I’m now in the 26-34 box on surveys, eeps!) – the Ladies section was formed around 16 years ago by a bunch of men’s team WAGs who fancied a go themselves. In the early days, the social side seemed highly important and I remember when I first joined some of the legendary drinking nights (three legged pyjama pub crawl? oh yes!), and the friendly faces down the club that made me stay – and which still make me stay. There are plenty of tales of games of old girls too, from the player who hoiked a tampon up her nose to stop a nosebleed, to the player who had no idea about rucking so just piled on with a bellyflop. Legends, all of them!

We’ve come a long way since I first started and we averaged about 9 people at training and scraped together a scratch side on a Sunday morning. Yesterday brought years of work from everyone involved to fruition. All those seasons developing training, recruiting players and creating a play hard/but have fun mentality paid off. We won our league, and we now are looking to go up to North One (subject to AGM vote).

me and my sis talk tactics ahead of the big game - or are we gossiping about our weekends?

North One is a whisker off the premiership – it’s going to be a big step up, and a long way off – some of our games will be 3.5hours drive away! But it’s also going to be an excellent challenge – we always play better against harder teams and we have nothing to lose. So what if we get mullered and come back down? It will be worth a try, and I reckon we’ll do better than we think.

So what’s next for Olney Ladies? If we make the move up, then we need ultra-dedication from the players to develop our game; we need commitment to training and playing away; we need to fundraise and get support from the club for coach trips (yay!) – and most importantly, we need to keep our ethos of playing to the best of our ability – but keeping our rugby FUN (in a bun)!

prettiful!