Bahamas Women Ready for Mexican Debuts at NACRA 7s Tournament

from ScrumQueens:

This weekend’s NACRA 7s tournament in Mexico City will see a first ever outing for the Bahamas women’s rugby team. Twelve players will represent the Bahamas at the event organised by the North America Caribbean Rugby Association where they will play against the women’s sides of St Lucia, the Cayman Islands, Jamaica and Guyana.

The players have been training together since the start of the summer and though they are inexperienced at this level, a number of the squad members have already represented their country in football with captain Daria Adderley also being the assistant coach for the Bahamas national football team.

Assistant coach Dorian Roach explained that the team had been training mostly with the men’s side all summer.

“Most of our drills are very basic including ball handling, spacing, lines of run and tackling. We have been working a lot of defensive alignment and are just getting into our set play working.”

Roach recently had the opportunity to draw on the coaching skills of the experienced USA women’s 7s coach Sue Parker at an IRB coaching course in Argentina.

“From Sue I learned a lot of drills that I have brought back with me to use with the girls and we have also recently added a lot of contact to our sessions. It is certainly hard to prepare for a tournament like this when we are unable to have any warm up games but we try to simulate game play as much as we can.”

Director of the Bahamas Rugby Football Union (BRFU) Elystan Miles says that it is going to be a tough debut for the women’s squad, however he believes that they can compete with the other teams in the region.

“It is going to be a real fight for the girls. All of the other teams they have competed in the past, but really, we are looking for them to place. We know that Guyana is really strong in both men and women rugby and they are pretty experienced. Our men, they have a chance of winning the tournament, but this is the first time for our women’s team. If they can go out there and get a couple of hits in, we would be very happy.

“We had a team come over from the states to play them in the summer and they did well. The biggest challenge for them is getting competition. Because we only have one team here, it is very hard for the girls to find competition. They’ve been training and have played some games with the men. The men’s team have been pretty hard on them, but they’ve been holding up pretty well.”

The Nacra 7s will be held this weekend and will be streamed live on www.mexrugby.com