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USA Rugby has unveiled a new calendar that will bring much-needed consistency to the Women’s Eagles program as they prepare for the 2021 World Cup. After finishing 4th at the 2017 tournament in Ireland, it was more than a year until the team would play again in November of 2018.
The new schedule sees a three-month preseason window followed by development camps that lead into regular test matches in June and July. Further development camps will follow in September and October with more test matches set for November.
Development along with Eagles coach Rob Cain, Women’s High Performance Manager Emilie Bydwell described the importance of the new strategic alignment in an official release.
“2018 was an important year for the Women’s 15s as it allowed us to reflect and set a platform for the 2021 World Cup Campaign. Women’s 15s has unique challenges, different from the other three national teams as the program does not have an annual competition structure like the HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series or the Men’s 15s Americas Rugby Championship.
“In conjunction with World Rugby’s hard work to advance Women’s 15s competitions, we believe it is a priority to establish a year-long infrastructure and communicate it to our players and community. While increasing test matches is critical, it can only be one pillar of our strategy. We need a plan that underpins the match schedule to truly maximize the opportunity of those additional fixtures.
“We believe that this strategy will allow our program to make the necessary progress in these two crucial development years of 2019 and 2020. Next we will be rolling out a similar infrastructure for our age-grade program that aligns and feeds into the senior plan.”
Opponents for this year’s June/July test window have yet to be confirmed.
