History
In the late 1990s women’s touch rugby was flourishing in the Cayman Islands under the guidance of Chris “Jacko” Jackson. A small core of all round sports women (Tracy Iler, Mitch Taylor, Lisa Kehoe) and contact rugby veterans (Karen Jessop and Jessica Lane) were keen to take the next step into forming a women’s contact rugby team. With the employment of Richard Adams as the CRFU’s first Director of Rugby in 2000 momentum began to grow until ex-rugby league professional, Steve “Smudger” Smith, was enlisted as the first women’s contact rugby coach. The initial training sessions saw about 14 women attending but as the reality of black eyes and bruises set in, the numbers quickly depleted. Then came an opportunity to train for a seven’s game against the national Jamaican women’s sevens team as part of a men’s sevens tournament being hosted in Kingston. The Cayman girls (all expats) trained hard under Smudger’s tutelage but arrived at the tournament as definite underdogs. The Jamaican team possessed speed and experience but on the day in question this proved no match for the Cayman team’s discipline, structure and hard tackling and the sprinting prowess of Janie Fleming and Lorna Campbell. The Cayman team beat the Jamaican team decisively, twice in one day, which caused a major upset in the Jamaican camp. The inaugural Cayman squad returned home with a taste for victory and a strong desire to improve at sevens and develop into a full 15s squad.
Read more about this topic: Cayman Islands Women's National Rugby Union Team
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)