Women's rugby on the rise

The growth of women's rugby in the Wairarapa-Bush area was there for all to see at Memorial Park, Masterton on Saturday.
The main curtain-raiser to the Heartland championship match between Wairarapa-Bush and Horowhenua-Kapiti was a game featuring two mainly secondary schoolgirls sides competing under the names of a Wairarapa Barbarians XV and a Wairarapa-Bush Invitation XV.
And there looked to be no shortage of promising talent in a high?scoring fixture won by the Barbarians 34-26.
Wairarapa-Bush Rugby Union development officer Lofty Stevenson was rapt that all but four of the 32 players involved in the action were from local colleges, including Tararua College, with the other four playing for the Eketahuna team which competes in the Manawatu women's competition.
Stevenson said it was the first time enough secondary school players were available for a match consisting of two 15-a-side teams and he was delighted to see it happen.
"We are getting more and more girls making rugby their number one sport and that's exciting for the future of the women's game here," he said.
"Obviously there is still plenty of work to do on the technical side of things but it's always easier to enhance that if you have the numbers to work with."
Stevenson expects the Wairarapa-Bush secondary schoolgirls side to make a decent impact at their Hurricanes tournament in Gisborne next week where the opposition will come from Horowhenua-Kapiti, Poverty Bay and Wanganui.
He says the expertise of their coaching staff, Sharon Haeata, Cala Timoti and Cherie Paku, only needs to rub off and they will hard to beat.
"We are very fortunate to have coaches who know what women's rugby is all about, who have been there, done that," he said.
Stevenson believes too that Saturday's curtain-raiser will help Wairarapa-Bush overcome a history of making a slow start in tournament play, mainly because the players went into it on a diet of 10-a-side play rather than 15's.
"It's usually taken us a game or two to get things organised but Saturday's match gave them an idea of what 15's is all about and that's a definite plus," he said.
Meanwhile, the Wairarapa-Bush side which hit the national sporting headlines by winning promotion to the then national first division competition in 1981 is holding a 25th re-union this weekend.
Spokesman Mike Cornford said it was expected that all but a handful of the squad, including coach and present All Blacks selector Sir Brian Lochore, would have a social get-together on Friday night, play golf on Saturday morning, view the Heartland championship game between Wairarapa-Bush and South Canterbury at Memorial Park on Saturday afternoon and then attend a dinner that night.
It is appropriate, of course, that it should be South Canterbury who is playing Wairarapa-Bush during the re-union festivities as in 1981 they were the South Island second division champions and Wairarapa-Bush had to beat them in Masterton to become national second division champions and consequently win the right to play the promotion-relegation game against Southland for the honour of being part of the national first division series in 1982.