Elaine Vassie

Losing 148-0 is no way to start a national league rugby career, but Elaine Vassie is made of sterner stuff. A rugby career that began as the result of a crash with an Army Land Rover, has zigzagged its way upward to Dallas, Texas, where she’s now helping to shape a new frontier in American rugby.

The Army Land Rover wasn’t supposed to be in the middle of the road when Elaine Vassie came around the corner. Driving on an unlit road at night, a broken down camouflage military vehicle is the last thing you expect. And so, the teenage Elaine drove straight into it. “I smashed the windscreen with my head, even though I had a seatbelt on,” she recalls. “I wouldn’t have comprehended that was a possibility because, perhaps naively, I always felt your seatbelt kept you restrained.”

At the time, Elaine was living in Hampshire and finishing her A-levels, with a plan to go to university and indulge in her passion for sport, netball was the main one, but she would have a go at anything – from tennis to trampoline. 

But the accident changed that. “I had months of headaches, of not being able to fully construct sentences,” she says, “Back then, this was around 2000, people weren’t talking about concussion like they are now, you’d have a scan and get sent home with a leaflet.

“They didn’t answer, ‘well, why have I still got headaches? Why am I struggling to process cognitively?’ I didn’t end up going to university.

“To be totally honest, I felt bleak about things,” she admits. “I’d had severe whiplash, everything was bruised. When I tried to go back to finish college I couldn’t concentrate. I’d study and think I was up to speed, then you’d lose the train of thought, or lose the focus, and I think that was really disengaging. Normally you have an impact, you get injured, you recover, but on the emotional side, this wasn’t right – I was just thinking, ‘why am I incapable?’ It wasn’t a pretty period.” 

Deciding not to return to college, she went through a time of ‘not doing that much’ and found work at a tennis centre part-time. No longer playing netball, some time passed before a friend suggested she come along to play rugby. “It’s probably logically the worse route,” she admits, “from whiplash and concussion to then playing rugby, but we’re talking probably a three-year timespan and I was feeling normal again and wanting to play sport.”

Joining Worthing RFC, she found herself playing a game within a week of the first session and loved it enough to want to know more. “I got into coaching, because I didn’t understand rugby in the way I’d understood other sports I’d played,” she admits. “It was just a selfish desire to learn more.”

A job doing contract work for health spas and clubs, meant Elaine starting travelling the country and, wherever she stayed, she’d find a club to get some game time, before settling in Manchester, where a flatmate was coaching Manchester Village Spartans. “I came down to watch them train, and they were really short of numbers, so they said ‘fancy jumping in?’, they just needed an extra body,” she says. “I enjoyed it and their coach was Phil Leck, who was at Sale Academy, and his son Chris who was also with Sale.”

As Chris’s rugby commitments picked up, Elaine found herself coaching the side. “They were an LGBT, all-inclusive side playing in the tail-end of the leagues, but coaching them was probably the most useful thing I’ve ever done,” she says. “You’re coaching a whole bunch of people who’d never played rugby before, or even played sport before, and as I wasn’t experienced, it was easier to understand where they were coming from and what they needed to enjoy the game.

“How they operated to build the team, how they built relationships, how they were inclusive – there were lessons there that I’ve used at every club I’ve ever been at since. It’s about how they built and retained a sustainable club.”

Off the field, she began taking her coaching badges and working with the RFU as a development officer across two clubs in Lancashire. After two years with the Spartans, another opportunity came along. “One of the coach development officers for the RFU, Paul Reid, knew Manchester had lost all of its funding and were going to be a rebuild project, and asked I’d be interested in joining him if he took the job on. He knew I was looking for more opportunities, and thought I could do something on the S&C and skills side, and he needed an extra pair of hands.”

The job was a monumental one.

The arrival of the Championship – from which Manchester had just descended – meant National League funding had been slashed and, combined with the loss of the club’s major sponsor, it meant an exodus of players and coaches. “They went from having hundreds of thousands as a budget to very, very little,” says Elaine. “In fairness to the players, they’d have earned a lot of their take home from Manchester, so they needed to go elsewhere to earn a living. What was left were some young lads that had come up from the colts, some of the vets – it wasn’t the players who would train on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and play Saturdays.”

According to reports, from a squad of 42, four remained, as funding went from £200,000 to £30,000. 

It didn’t seem to be the most appealing of posts to start an international rugby coaching career. “I joke about it,” she says, “But I probably ended up taking a lot of jobs that other people wouldn’t – they’ve never been the ideal picture, but they were always an opportunity to learn and they all paid dividends ten-fold.”

And, of course, it wasn’t as if Elaine had played or coached a huge amount of rugby – she was still 28 and had only picked up the game in her early 20s. “Wherever I’ve coached, I know there are going to be players that know more than me, and that’s true to this day,” she admits, “I think with Manchester it was the project we were buying in to. I turned up on the first day of pre-season and there weren’t even enough men there to put out a team.”

The first game saw Paul and Elaine’s hastily put together team lose 148-0 away to league favourites Esher. A first try in the second minute began a flood of 22 tries, scored at intervals of less than four minutes. “I think it was sobering to watch,” she admits. “We knew there was a big task at hand, we knew the difference financially, we knew the difference between hiring people for a certain amount of money and having volunteers, but I don’t think we really knew [the impact of that], until we saw it front of us.”

It didn’t get easier, the next three results saw them go down 95-0 to Nuneaton, 124-5 to Blaydon and 124-5 to Wharfedale. “It was difficult to watch,” she says. “It’s not a case of ‘there’s a couple of tweaks needed’ or, ‘if we do this differently...’, it was a sizeable gap. 

“What made it even harder was that I’m hugely competitive,” continues Elaine. “If we played tiddly winks now or even just competed over throwing paper into a bin, I’d want to win. I always want to compete and watching it unfold was hard because there really wasn’t a whole lot we could impact on.

“It was men against boys, and that’s not to be disrespectful to the lads, because for them to choose to put themselves out there, week-in, week-out, says a lot about them and their character. They were prepared to do that, because they wanted to grow.”

After six games and six defeats, they had shipped 698 points. With Paul Reid stepping down for personal reasons, Elaine found herself being offering the lead role. “No-one else is going to take that job,” she admits. “Why am I qualified? Because I was prepared to do it.

“At that stage we had a good chairman, some of the old boys were really good, and what’s interesting is that, if you look at rugby coaching styles and where you fit in, I think the reality was I knew I didn’t know as much as them, so I was player-centred through necessity.

“I’d be asking them questions: ‘well, what do you think?’ ‘What are you seeing?’ 

“We also said ‘let’s forget about the scoreline’, there was no point talking about it, but we could develop in areas we can control and get some consistency. That was probably huge for me in terms of practical experience. Lots of people talk about ‘forgetting the scoreline’ but we did it and in such extreme circumstances, you get buy in. And, actually, things do start to happen when you put in some process and forget about the score.”

The hefty defeats still arrived, with Manchester relegated to National 2 after losing every game, scoring 114 but conceding 2,626.  

Margins did reduce, even losing by 119-0 in the return fixture against moneybags Esher represented a 30-point improvement, and they also began an ethos of opportunity.

“We were like ‘we’re the pathway for every guy sat on a bench waiting for his chance in a National League club, waiting for his chance, and he’s not getting it’, that’s the kind of player we want to appeal too,” she says. “We’re young, so come and play with us, come and play with us for a season and, if you get signed by someone else, you’ve moved on up your pathway, we’ll pat you on the back and say ‘you’ve not done it the easy way, but thanks’.”

Losing consistently also meant, when they did get the ball, they tried not to waste it. “We said, ‘let’s play’. We’re not going to play ten-man rugby and kick down the field – frankly, we’re doing enough defending the rest of the time without giving the ball away, so if we get it, we’re going to play.”

Forgetting the scoreline was easier for some than others. “I didn’t pay attention, but I’m sure some of lads will have them engrained in their head, because they’d be notable in terms of experience,” she says. “But as a coaching staff, it wasn’t [something we thought about]. I can tell you we were under 100 points before Christmas, so the scorelines started to come down a little at that point. Although when you go from losing by 120, to 70-odd, that’s 50 points better. 

“In the second season we started to have more parts of the game where we’d compete,” explains Elaine. “So, if we didn’t concede in the first five or ten minutes that would be huge, then trying not to concede immediately after half time, which is something a lot of teams focus with. We’d be looking at mental strength, and those little wins were big things for us.”

In the third season they won a cup game, but in an English rugby pyramid where clubs as low as level eight or nine may still be handing their players cash, Manchester’s team of old hands and youngsters still couldn’t be expected to compete in the higher echelons. 

It would take until March 2012, three years and 87 games after their previous win, for Manchester to be able to put a ‘W’ in the league record books, with a 17-5 victory over Old Northamptonians. “The bigger picture for me, was the club,” says Elaine. “The club’s big fear was that they’d have to fold and have go down to the bottom of the leagues. Some people thought they should take that route, but if the board don’t want that, players don’t want that, and when people are writing you off, saying you’ll be gone by Christmas, there’s some bloody mindedness involved in proving them wrong. Even it took years to find our level, we won’t fold.”

In that third season, Elaine left Manchester. “Some of the players who’d been with us since day one, felt they could have a chance of playing higher, and we probably needed to drop another division to find our level.

“Getting to that point, when you’d done the hard yards in keeping the team together, takes a lot out of you. There wouldn’t be a Friday night when I wasn’t trying to get a squad together, never mind making your selection ahead of training on a Thursday night. Every Friday, it was a case of, ‘what else can we do to make sure we have a squad for Saturday...’

“We probably needed a change then, myself included, to freshen things up and to move things further forward.

“The margins we were losing by, were now similar to those in other National League games and we knew we didn’t have something that was going to crumble when we left.” 

Lost in the story somewhat, was also the fact Elaine had become the first female director of rugby in National League rugby, although it wasn’t something she was keen to talk about at the time.

“It was awkward to be honest,” she admits. “The notable thing here isn’t that you’ve got a woman as coach, the notable thing is that you’ve got a club with such a great history at risk of folding and going out of the leagues – that’s the story. Even the fact they have one of the strongest mini and junior sections in the area, this can still happen to a club, that’s the story. There should be a warning system and checks before this point to stop this from happening – it needs to be for the sustainability of our sport to be valued.”

When her partner, now husband, Danny Carlton got offered a playing contract in Italy, she decided to join him. Eventually, she’d pick up coaching work in northern Italy with Serie C side DAK Mantova. “It’s phenomenal how they train out there,” she says, “four or five times a week is normal for club rugby. 

“I ended up coaching the men’s side and there was a language barrier, as I spoke no Italian and they didn’t speak English, so trying to facilitate that wasn’t easy – I think that’s a running theme through my career, always taking over in slightly different situations.”

Another offer for Danny, this time to America with the Dallas Griffins. “He came out for three months on a holiday visa, and I came out to visit for a couple of weeks, and the guy in charge there, Phil Camm – who is now one of the owners of the Dallas Jackals [the new Major League Rugby side] – said, ‘do you fancy doing a bit of coaching?’. They didn’t have a functioning lineout and wanted to sort it in time for the play-offs, so I had five sessions focussed on that.”

The following year, she was offered a full-time role with the Griffins, where she’d spend two years as director of rugby and head coach, while also working across Texas. “We’ve not been to that many places in America,  but the people are really welcoming, the southern hospitality is definitely a thing,” she says. “They all want to say hello, to get to know you, and a neighbour might actually pop over for a cup of sugar – things you don’t see as much anymore back home.”

Been to the Dallas set yet? “That ranch is literally twenty minutes down the road,” laughs Elaine, “My sister did the tour. You only see a few people wear cowboy hats though, although there’s a lot of people wearing cowboy boots, which is actually practical.

“It’s not something I thought about before, but you get a lot of snakes and spiders here, so owning a pair of good boots isn’t a bad strategy if you’re working in fields or walking on trails.”

Elaine and Danny spent two years in Dallas first time around, returning in 2015, before applying for the green card to head back in 2018. “We kind of missed a lot of the things about America,” she says. 

When they returned Elaine worked for Dallas Harlequins – “another rebuild project,” she adds – and also found time to have the couple’s first child. Elaine knew Major League Rugby was going to happen at some point with Phil [who she’d worked for at the Griffins] having bought into Major League Rugby. “Phil had reached out to say that, at some stage, Major League Rugby will be coming to Dallas, so would I be open to that when it occurs?”

She didn’t need asking twice and was appointed assistant general manager and assistant coach. Uniquely for Elaine she was signing up for a ground-up build, rather than a rebuild. “It’s a nice blend,” she says. “We have the real luxury of starting from scratch and being able to come into a programme with a staff team and say, ‘right what are we about, what are our values, what do we want to achieve?’ We have a blank sheet of paper, and that’s huge.

“There’s an opportunity here and the interesting thing in Dallas, is that this has always been a very strong area for rugby. The Dallas Reds have consistently had one of the, if not the, highest numbers of registered players in the USA for a club.

“The Reds will have over 100 on the books, the Quins probably 90 registered players, and both of those are Division 1 sides – Quins are also about to celebrate 50 years, so by American standards that’s a long time.”

“The Dallas Jackals is about building a pathway for local talent to come through,” continues Elaine. “That’s what Dallas is itching for, to see that route, because there is a volume of players here now. They’re starting to see more players at high school and colleges, a couple of clubs have minis and juniors, and for them to see the other end – rugby as a career – is hugely exciting.”

The squad is taking shape, with players picked up from Colorado [who recently left MLR], the collegiate draft – they had first pick from 450 eligible players – and assorted other routes, Phil and Elaine have quite the task in assembling a competitive squad. “Honestly, I think there’s so much excitement about this,” she says. “We moved back to America because we like America and we specifically like Dallas and I think the sport is different here. How sport is perceived is different, the type of athlete is different, and actually the pathway to rugby is not dissimilar to mine, they arrived much later, but I think the growth ahead of it, that’s the exciting thing.

“To have an ownership group, to be with Allen Clarke [head coach], who are all driven by building pathways for domestic talent and inspiring the community, is a real privilege.”

What’s more, all of the experiences that have taken Elaine to this point, including 148-0 drubbings by Esher, have helped shape her into the ideal candidate for this role.

“Normally, in coaching, you play for your club, start coaching, maybe get involved with the academy,” says Elaine. “That’s not been my journey, but the luxury I’ve had is that there’s been so many different experiences, cultures, people, scenarios, that I’ve been able to get to a truer place as to where I place my values – that’s what’s been consistent throughout.”

But a few wins would be nice? “Yes, yes it would,” she says. “I think that’s what professional sport is, there’s obviously a focus on wins and losses. But I think for us, the bigger thing behind all of this, is having some of those wins because there is a kid that grew up in Dallas, played college rugby, came into our squad, and became a star. Hopefully they then go on to be an international. That’s the kind of win we want.”   

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures from Davey Wilson

This extract was taken from issue 11 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.