Your Scrumhalf Connection - Women's Rugby Blog

I am sure most of the women's rugby world was following the Women's National Team's progress at the Nations Cup and have also been following Goff's and other news sources updates on the tournament. Goff's latest article Eagle Eye on USA Women (subscription required) has really stirred up the pot. Within two hours of posting the article there were already 2 pages of comments and overnight there is another page of comments.

Some of the points of Goff's article in my opinion are out of line and some are of course right in line. Along the same idea, some of the comments are well thought and well written, while some of the comments are low-class and irrelevant. However, I do not want to open a hate fest or a negative arena like Goff's comments have become. Let's really get down to the nitty gritty and lets talk about what we really think will help. Put Me in Coach posted along the same lines yesterday and a few of you have emailed with similar interests. I have posted one of the best written responses yet and Kalie from Brown University has let me know that I can share it on this forum.

Wendy-

I realized very quickly this afternoon that Alex Goff did a pretty good job opening a tricky can of worms regarding the WNT. The responses to his article are all over the place (the ones posted on the site), but clearly he hit some nerves in the wider rugby community....

I have plenty of criticisms for Goff, and often I just take his writing with a shaker of salt and leave the rest be.

But I don't think that his article should be the only point of reference for what he's talking about. He goes from lesbianism to league structures--it's too much at once, it's too complicated and his oversimplification is a bad choice to make...one conversation is about collegiate play, one is about adult league structures, another is about elite level professionalism, one is about national team development structure, another is about the presence of communities within rugby, another is about sport and sexuality and identity...etc etc He leaves it as a jumble, and his audience sounds like its running right into that jumble.

I think it would be a very interesting opportunity to capture more articulate and thoughtful responses, writing, opinions, and questions that come from some of this. Untangle the different ideas that he gets at, and shed the most accurate light on the issues. While it would be easy enough to send out a few emails to my own rugby network and get well written thoughts back, I figured I'd turn to you first, and see if you think it'd be worthwhile to use this as a chance to invite people to respond personally (personal email) and honor the well written arguments...synthesize some things into your own blog entries, or something like that. Pretty much, I started writing down what I had to say, but realized my ideal would be to coordinate....to really look into this in a legitimate way... your thoughts??? I must sound vague right now, but I have some specific ideas spinning around my head...

Let me know what you think if you get a chance.

Best,
Kalie Gold

Brown University '08
Brown Women's Rugby (alumna)

So Kalie has started the conversation, what do you want to talk about? What parts of this program need tweaking? Is it really money, sexuality, staff etc...please keep in mind that I will not delete your comment or email because it is negative, but I would hope that we can all be positive and really work on things that can be fixed.

Send me your thoughts via email or leave them in the comments.