The Ole Miss Women’s Rugby team enters the spring season with promise ahead of their first official tournament at the end of February.
The Lady Rebels will play two times this season. On Feb. 22, they will travel to Starkville, Miss., for a round robin tournament with Mississippi State, Georgia Tech and Alabama. On April 12, Ole Miss is back on the road to Baton Rouge, La., to face LSU in the annual crawfish sevens tournament.
The women’s team has 15 members, enough to fill a sevens competition team. In 2022, the women’s team fielded five to six players.
Rugby can be played with two lineups based on team size. Teams can choose to play 15s, fielding 15 players at once, or sevens, fielding seven.
On Oct. 18, 2024, the team won its first official game against Mississippi State in Oxford, marking the team’s first sevens match since the club was founded in 2022.
Miriam King, a senior political science and philosophy double major, initially was a rugby team player but has transitioned to the role of head coach for the program.
“I’ve been rebuilding my four years at college, and last year we actually had enough girls to field a team, which is super exciting,” King said. “I’m really proud of all the girls who just continuously showed up, even knowing that they have a really busy schedule, and they were doing something really hard, because they’re learning a whole new sport.”
One of the biggest challenges the club faced was spreading awareness.
“Rugby is one of the fastest growing sports in the U.S. But when you think about it, you don’t necessarily think about there being a women’s team,” King said. “Especially at a school in the South where rugby isn’t huge, we had to draw attention to the fact that we actually have a club on campus. So we recruited, recruited and recruited, and I’m really proud of that.”
Alongside King is captain Mabrie Woods, a senior international studies and Arabic double major from Olive Branch, Miss. Woods helped start the program in 2022.
Woods was inspired to help field a women’s rugby team because of the sport’s uniqueness and its inclusivity for all players.
“I learned (about rugby) from an Instagram video, which is crazy. I learned nothing about (rugby) before that,” Woods said. “The thing that finally sold me on it was this interview with this girl talking about how she didn’t start rugby until college.”
At the team’s practice on Monday, Feb. 3, the club welcomed three new players who had never competed in the sport prior to attending practice.
Woods stressed that no prior experience is necessary to join the team.
“None of these new girls had ever played before, and I love that because it’s just really the willingness to learn new things because that’s hard to do once you get older,” Woods said. “I’m not worried about how it’s going to affect practice after today. We’ll pull them aside, show little things and then we’ll throw them in, and (they’ll be) fine.”
King highlighted the strong connection between Ole Miss and women’s rugby programs at other colleges.
“If we don’t have enough girls to field a team, sometimes (other teams) loan us some of theirs,” King said. “And there’s no sabotage. It’s all love. Everybody works their hardest to build camaraderie and push themselves to be the best they can be.”
