Scottish women’s rugby is set to learn from the experience enjoyed by its new boss while she was becoming the country’s most capped footballer during what amounted to a cultural revolution.
Gemma Fay has had three months to assess the challenge facing her as the SRU’s head of women’s and girls’ rugby and she acknowledged yesterday that it is comparable with what confronted Anna Signeul, the woman who steered Scotland to a breakthrough appearance in the finals of the European Championships last year before standing down after 12 years in charge.
Before retiring last year, Fay won the majority of her record 203 caps under the Swede so witnessed first hand the way in which she professionalised Scottish women’s football and believes the national rugby team is now being invited to address similar issues.
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Part of that involves the lack of opportunities to play the sport professionally at home, something Signeul had to address in taking over a squad that had no full-time players. When she stood down from the Scotland job the vast majority of her European Championship squad were playing the game professionally in other countries.
Some of the leading Scottish players are already plying their trade in England and France and in admitting that such opportunities are unlikely to emerge in Scotland in the foreseeable future, Fay suggested that others will face major decisions if they are to maximise their potential as they focus on their principal target of qualifying for the next World Cup in 2021.
“If you are a player that has aspirations at an international level you have to decide if the environment you are in is good enough for you and if that is the case we will support you in that,” said Fay.
“You may want to play elsewhere and that is your decision. We wouldn’t make that choice for a player, however every decision in life has consequences so if your performance and development doesn’t improve then once again you have a decision to make. It can work either way. I played most of my own career in Scotland and I knew the reasons why and the level of performance I had to hit to continue to develop. Players and people will always make decisions, at the end of the day we want to support our players to be the best rugby players they can be. We will never force a player to make a decision. We want them to be good people too and we want to support them too.”
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As in the men’s game, however, rugby has far fewer professional leagues than football across Europe, while Fay recognised that while there are benefits to players competing in France and England, they cannot simply be left to their own devices.
“If you go across the [football] leagues in the English Super League, Spain, Germany, Sweden and Iceland they are pro, but that isn’t the case in rugby,” she observed.
“So, if players are sent elsewhere in rugby we have to make sure that our S&C (strength and conditioning) coach liaises with that club and that player to make sure we can support them the best they can. It is like when I played down south for Leeds and Brighton, I wasn’t earning money through that and I still had a job up here, but my support I had up here allowed me to get more competitive action down there.”
That being the case Fay said that having been struck by “the vastness of the organisation,” on moving to a sport that was run by a handful of people until it went open little more than two decades ago, the resources she and head coach Shade Munro have at their disposal in many ways outstrip those available to Signeul when she arrived at Hampden in 2005.
“If we talk about the national team, we have some great support around that,” she noted.“We have a full-time national coach, full-time S&C, we have nutrition support, full-time physio - we have a lot of support round that team. We’ve also got four girls on BT Stage Three Academy contracts as well.
“So, in terms of resource, we’ve got a lot in place that it took football quite a while to get. Now we have to support the girls, to give them the opportunity to train more, to recover more, to develop those performance behaviours, which are there, but it takes time for that to happen and my job with the other staff is to try and create the best environment to allow that to happen.”
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