The world is a shitshow but the sun is out and in the field across from me the sheep are running their mental creche in which they gaze on maternally as hoards of lambs play chaotic games of chase. I am in the mood for some good news, so here’s some – yesterday Biggar Ladies rugby team was promoted to the top tier in Scottish woman’s rugby.
While this wasn’t good news for the valiant Stewartry who fought incredibly hard and were only beaten by the last kick of the ball three-and-a-half minutes into overtime, the good news isn’t just about one club celebrating. It’s about how we got here.
My support for women’s rugby is decades old. When I was playing in the 1990s a bunch of the woman at the club were sick of just watching us and fancied a shot for themselves. They set up the first woman’s team at Biggar before women’s rugby was even recognised by the SRU. In fact we were the first non-university club side in Scotland to set up a woman’s team.
That team did well, very notably producing the exceptional Donna Kennedy who went on to become the most capped woman in Scottish international rugby history. The woman’s team built up into quite a substantial presence, but the club really hand’t caught on. The pipeline of player production was still male-dominated and when the generation which formed that team got older and retired, there weren’t enough players coming through to maintain it.
For the next decade or so, it looked like women’s rugby in Biggar was over, but that missed the much more important change that was taking place. At every level up until secondary school, rugby is now mixed gender. Our minis setup started to attract more girls. Then more. Then more.
At some age levels in the club girls now outnumber boys two-to-one. And forget your stereotypes, girls love battering into each other with gleeful abandon every bit as much as boys. So increasingly these girls wanted to keep playing. So the club accommodated them, and this led to an increasingly strong secondary-school-age setup at the club.
And when I say increasingly strong, I mean that over a decade or more I think there was barely a year when at least one of our U14, U16 or U18 girls didn’t win their league. And then one year we noticed that all of them did. And then they kept doing it (only the U16 didn’t this year). We started to produce players who were moving into the Scotland set up, or to top tier clubs in Scotland.
That is usually the death knell for smaller clubs – to become a feeder to others so you lose your talent and are always running to stand still. That’s not what happened – as success grew, more girls wanted to be involved. Quite remarkably, our Under 14s are now running two full teams, two squads of 15 players.
“Bring success and we’ll talk again” said the old-school men running the club which wasn’t meant to be encouraging – or rather, not the first time
Then, separately and barely linked to this, about 12 years ago a group of young mothers in town got to talking and, not ones for the neat indoor exercise of pilates or something, asked if someone would help them run ladies training – not to play, just for exercise, like boxercise. My partner was one of them.
I think it was about within a year that they were enjoying hitting the pads so much they started playing little mini-games in training. Cristina would come home and explain the exhilarating buzz of contact rugby (this was to be the start of a lot of mansplaining in our house given that I’d played a trial game for Scotland U21s and was a permanent starter for the club’s first team for years).
They asked if they could organise a social game. They loved it. They organised more. They joined the regional league. More women joined. Quite quickly they started to get serious. This is where so much of my optimism begins – because the male-dominated committee were initially dismissive.
The women started to complain that they were being poorly treated compared to the men. This wasn’t entirely fair (this was a start-up team comparable to the third team so comparing with the established first team wasn’t really right), but when the third team finish a game they’re not expected to staff the kitchen themselves (you know, boys and all that) and the women were. And the men got the water heating turned on on the nights they trained.
“Bring success and we’ll talk again” said the old-school men running the club. Make no mistake, that was patronising and dismissive, it wasn’t meant to be encouraging. Or rather, not the first time. The first time they said that they really meant ‘your not a serious proposition’. So the woman fought their corner and built. There were tensions.
But they really did build, and they started getting good. They were winning games and training as hard as then men. So when they pushed again and the committee said “bring success and we’ll talk again”, now it was more like curiosity – and it included an element of genuine enthusiasm. So the woman kept getting better and kept winning, climbing leagues.
And then one day when they said “get better and we’ll talk”, the men were being sincere. They could see the effort that was going in. They could see the quality that was developing. And frankly we’re a family club that is proud of every level. That this progression took place over a single club presidency of three years puts this into perspective. This wasn’t a long, slow slog.
By now Biggar was sending players all over the place in the top tier and the younger age groups were dominant. And suddenly watching the women play was thrilling – their ball handling was exciting to watch, they had tackle-breakers, were pulling off behind-the-back passes, they were hammering teams.
It was giddy, and it led the team to a national final at Murrayfield (not the top-tier final, the plate). It was one of the best days I can remember in recent years. We had two big busses of supporters through and loads came under their own steam. The party at the clubhouse could have been for a triumphant men’s team so euphoric was it. Our club was totally won over by our woman.
Shortly after that I was back at Murrayfield to watch my daughter in the national U16 final. They won. Our senior stand-off was taken from us, but that is because she is now a regular for Scotland. Recently, when the U18 women’s squad was named, six out of 24 players came from our little club.
Last night the far right and the Christian conservatives didn’t seem so scary
My partner retired in the season after the final so I’ve not been down quite as much in the last 18 months, but yesterday was special. The weather was amazing and we had hundreds of supporters at the game, at least as many as even a prominent mens’ match, and many more than the vast majority of them. Our club has gone from tolerating women’s rugby to putting it right at the centre of the club in ten years.
There are two massively encouraging points for me from this. The first is that in an era when young people are playing sport less and less, this experience has shown that it needn’t be like that. Of the endless heart-lifting progressions, in early games some of the women were deeply uncomfortable with body issues (rugby is not just tolerant but welcoming of a wide range of body types).
A couple of years later? Such an idea would be preposterous. They’re all excellent sportswomen and very proud of what they do. If you can create the structure and support and enthusiasm for participation, people still want to participate. They want to participate in large numbers. It’s not the kids walking away, it’s the adults failing to provide that infrastructure and that support.
If only we as a nation supported those who give so much time to voluntary organisations, it could be transformative. We’re a small town with a strong community, but there is no alchemy in this renaissance, just effort and giving-a-damn.
The second learning point for me is even more encouraging – this rapid transformation changed everything it touched in our club, and it did so without anyone having to be hit over the head. There were battles and attitudes in need of changing and all the rest, but the brute force aggression of identity politics was not needed. Just mutual working.
What I have enjoyed so much is watching the old men change. These guys were running the club when I played and 20-plus years on they’re not youthful. But their attitudes have changed enormously. The kind of unthinking sexism that pervaded is just not there now. The guys are as proud of the women as of the men. You should have seen the celebrations yesterday. No-one could have been more delighted than the auld yins. That wasn’t always true.
Misogyny among young men? I’m down at the club gym every week and the only thing I hear from the boys for the women players is respect.
We fear regression, going back, social decline, the failure of our progress. We are scared of Trump and Bannon and Farage. Well I’ll tell you what, not half as scared as Trump or Bannon or Farage would be if they found themselves on a pitch with the women. They’re not going back into the kitchen. It is that simple.
Better still, no-one in the club wants them to. We are changed, changed utterly, for good and for better. No blood was spilled, no manifestos produced, no-one got cancelled, no-one is angry, no-one is resentful. We are joined together in a shared understanding that not one of us would go backwards even if we could.
Last night the far right and the Christian conservatives didn’t seem so scary. We are better people than we think we are. The world can change and no-one has to be hurt. Amen to that, and roll on next season.