Annual Award
Through our partnership with the British & Irish Lions, we’ve created the Championing Women and Girls’ Rugby Award, which celebrates outstanding initiatives by grassroots clubs to support women’s rugby in their communities.
Each year, we award one club from each Home Union with a special trophy, plus a £10,000 grant to further invest in their women and girls’ programmes. By celebrating and showcasing these spearheading clubs, we also hope to inspire others to achieve more.
We had over 120 applications for the 2024 award showcasing some fantastic clubs across the UK and Ireland. Our winners all demonstrated:
- Innovative ways to engage their local communities
- Initiatives to improve access to playing
- Equality across the club both on and off the pitch
- Celebration of women's success beyond annual awards
- Clearly established pathways for progression of players as well as coaches, staff and leadership at all levels
- Recognition of what they still need to do to continue championing women and girls’ rugby and clearly articulated the measurable impact the grant will have on achieving this
Read more about our 2024 winners below.
Applications for the 2025 award are now closed and winners will be announced later in the year.
Transcript
Sorcha Mac Laimhin: Trust the person on that side of you to get up and make a touch, so that you’ve got the last person.
My name is Sorcha Mac Laimhin, and I'm a volunteer here at Cooke Rugby Club. And this is my daughter Meave, and she’s two.
With the funding from Royal London, we were able to start a beginner’s programme, which we’ve called Touch to Tackle, and that’s a programme for mum’s and beginners to introduce them to rugby.
Raissa Balduino: The community you build with rugby, it’s the bet one, and after doing this, it’s really true, like I was looking forward to every Monday just to get in there, seeing the girls and just having a great time.
Erin Brennan: Coming here, meeting these girls, they’re so lovely, and it’s good for fitness, it’s good for community, it’s all positive really, yeah.
Sorcha Mac Laimhin: It was inspired by the fact that we’ve got quite a lot of mums playing here at the club, and in fact we had a match last season and one of the girls was coming back from maternity leave, and she brought her little girl with her to the match, and naturally she was a bit anxious about having her baby on the side of at the side of the pitch while she was playing, and we were all trying to reassure her, you know, we’ve got Sorcha’s a mum, Alana’s a mum, Jane’s a mum, somebody will be there. And we sort of realised we have enough people here actually to make a sevens team. So that sort of inspired the idea.
I just really love getting more people into rugby, and particularly women and girls. It’s a sport that I’ve really enjoyed playing, and that I’ve really benefitted from, and I just want more people to be able to access that. And I guess I hope in the future that Maeve will get to play rugby at some point.
It’s been really great to see them develop over the course of eight weeks. So when they first turned up, none of them had ever played rugby before, and we started just with like really basic skills like catch, pass, and things like that. Now, you know, they’re starting to identify space, they’re communicating really effectively. Just today I think it will be really exciting to see them put it all together and really enjoy playing a match.
The Royal London grant has just really accelerated what we’re able to do. We’ve got 15 brand new players, which we would have struggled to recruit without that extra funding to help us run the programme. I just think the support from Royal London has been amazing. It just demonstrates that this is a really valuable asset, and you should be investing in women’s sports because the impact that you can have in local communities is just incredible, and it’s really wide reaching. I mean it just gives me hope for the future that we’ll just see women and girls rugby continue to grow and to flourish.
Transcript
Elain Martin: East Kilbride set up a rugby club about 52 years ago. It’s the only rugby club within East Kilbride. So, in 2022, we had one girl, who was moving up from U18s to senior rugby. In the past, these players are with other clubs, and we've never been able to start a women's team. And I said right, can we make a team? Can we do a team? Can we play rugby?
Diane Gourley: I think we started with just a handful, maybe 6 or 7 girls. Now, oh gosh, there must be over 40 of us. We’ve got a big pool now. She’s done an amazing job, getting so many women together.
Elain Martin: So, I seen the advert for Royal London to apply for the grant and I thought it's a great opportunity. I applied in a whim to see. Probably not got much chance of getting this, but why not? Let’s just apply and let’s just sell the club, sell the amount of stuff that we actually do in the background, and hopefully be successful.
It will grow the game with regards to we'll have more grass areas to train on. It's also more local. We have changing room facilities that we'll need to do some work on. Just so appreciative that we actually got it.
Diane Gourley: Getting that money, getting that funding, it's just going to help us get awareness out there, get more women up. This club's been amazing. Not just for fitness, not just for sport, but for people's mental health. People use this as an escape, and it's just it's great and the funding is going to go a long way.
Shannon Marton: If you ever want to play rugby, just go along to your local team, meet new people, meet friends, and you'll never regret it.
Elaine Martin: Just seeing the kids develop, passing a ball, scoring that try, making a tackle. That's what I get the joy out of. We say, ‘Be as good as you can be. ’ We don't force them to play competitive games. They just try it and go, ‘Oh, my goodness, what a hit they get after it.’ It's just like, ‘Oh, wow. ’ And they just love it. People I just that I would never thought would have played are dying to play.