Leicester Tigers
Almost seven years after being brutally cut from the women’s top tier, Lichfield are back in the top flight, helping to power an icon of English rugby as Leicester Tigers make their Premiership Women’s Rugby debut.
The arrival of Leicester Tigers on the women’s rugby stage is the latest turn in the tortuous recent history of the women’s game in the Midlands, one that begins at and returns to a rugby club an hour’s drive west of Mattioli Woods Welford Road, in Lichfield. Once a leading light of the women’s domestic game, Lichfield Ladies finished second in the 2016/17 Women’s Premiership – before it became the Premier 15s and now Premiership Women’s Rugby – but when the new competition rolled around, they were nowhere to be seen.
Inexplicably at the time, the RFU had pulled up the drawbridge on Lichfield’s participation, and so, in a puff of smoke, the club that had produced the likes of Sarah Hunter, Emily Scarratt and Amy Cokayne were excluded from top tier. In their place came Loughborough Lightning, a newly formed team attached to the university, who absorbed the majority of Lichfield’s title-challenging squad.
Retreating back into their strength as a development club, Lichfield spent the next few seasons competing in the Women’s Championship, performing strongly but invariably finishing second to the likes of West Park Leeds and Cheltenham Tigers outside of covid seasons. Memories of the top flight had grown distant at Cooke Fields but, in 2021, a new opportunity arose out of the embers of the pandemic. Leicester Tigers were finally in a position to start a women’s team, and they wanted to partner with Lichfield to do it.
A Tigers women’s team has been a long time coming – while the club have long supported women’s rugby through their community outreach programmes, a women’s performance pathway had existed only as a pipe dream in the minds of a few, one of those being Scott Clarke.
Scott first joined Tigers way back in 2002 as a casual coach before moving into roles as head of community and eventually vice president of global partnerships. To add to his tally of titles, he is also the general manager of Tigers Women. “I used to have numerous conversations with the previous CEO [Simon Cohen] about what we were doing in the community and how 50 per cent of the people we were seeing out there in schools and universities were young girls,” he reveals to Rugby Journal. “I’m a father of two daughters myself: where was the Tigers pathway for them? It was glaringly obvious there were omissions; when you get to the age of thirteen and you’re a boy, you could join the Tigers DPP and your elite pathway doors were suddenly open. On the other side of the fence for the girls, if you were thirteen, we’d see you in secondary schools and link you to your local rugby club, but then it stopped. There was no elite pathway for the girls to pursue that passion with Tigers.”
In his various partnership roles, Scott was charged with spreading the Tigers’ footprint globally, instilling programmes as far away as South America, Japan and Malaysia. And yet a domestic women’s pathway couldn’t make its way onto the boardroom agenda and Scott was desperate to change that, but finances were an inevitable barrier. “I’ve always been an advocate for it,” he explains. “But Leicester Tigers is a professional rugby club and at the time the women’s game wasn’t professional. Just as we don’t run minis, we didn’t want to tread on the toes of the local clubs that were running women’s teams.”
As practical as this decision was from a development and community point of view, it didn’t solve the issue that for young, ambitious female rugby players who grew up dreaming of running down those famous old steps at Mattioli Woods Welford Road, it simply wasn’t an option. Local girls were desperate for that opportunity – just ask Vicky Macqueen, the 32-cap Red Rose and now head of Women’s Rugby at Tigers, once a young player learning her rugby a few miles southeast at Hinckley Rugby Club. “I watched the Leicester Tigers for years but had to travel to Saracens to play my Premiership Rugby, three or four times a week driving down the motorway,” she explains. “So, for me, Leicester needed that women’s rugby team, it wasn’t whether it was going to be, it was when it was going to be. I just wanted it to be now.”
When it came to recruitment, it was vital for Vicky to have players like herself who’d always aspired to wear the Tigers’ stripes. There was only one person to call first. “Tash Jones had retired from rugby, but I knew she still had a lot of rugby in her. So, I approached her first and just said, ‘look, how do you fancy coming back for Leicester Tigers?’”
“I literally didn’t even hesitate,” recalls Tash, a lifelong Leicester Tigers fan and now club captain of Tigers Women. “I used to be a season ticket holder and go with my family every weekend, without fail. When my rugby increased, I couldn’t commit to going to all the matches, but when I had a free weekend, I would still go down and watch in the Crumbie.”
Tash first picked up a rugby ball aged eight at Leicester Forest Rugby Club and was the only girl in her age group. She had to stop playing with the boys aged twelve and move to the girls’ section but had some pretty decent company. “Emily Scarratt was in the year above me; we went to school together and she lived in the same village. We joined together and had Vicky Fleetwood and Jenny Maxwell there, so quite a few names who went on to play for England and Scotland.”
After a few seasons at Forest, Tash was scouted to join then-Premiership side Lichfield, playing for the under-18s and training with the senior squad until she was allowed to do contact at eighteen. “Sarah Hunter, I always remember she hit me,” she says. “And I’d never been hit so hard in my life. It was quite an introduction.” Tash stayed with Lichfield until their removal from the Premiership, forcing her to switch to Lightning for her top-level rugby. It was the year after that, halfway through a season off, that she got the call from Vicky.
“Growing up, when people found out that I played rugby, they asked me, ‘do you play for Leicester Tigers Women?’, and I’d have to always say, ‘no, there isn’t a team’. People couldn’t understand why, and I didn’t understand why either. So it’s an absolute dream come true that it’s happening, and the fact that Vicky asked me to be captain as well. I’m still pinching myself every time I say I play for Leicester Tigers, or run out at Mattioli Woods Welford Road, it’s still amazing to me.
“Even entering the ground and going into the changing rooms, it’s all old-school with the benches and the emblem on the wall, little things like that. The big thing is hearing Smoke on the Water and then going down those iconic stairs onto the pitch. It just feels crazy to wear that badge.”
On top of players like Tash, Vicky needed to add some stardust. “When I look back now, from when we had nothing to where we are now, it’s crazy really,” she says. “We knew once that Tigers vehicle was rolling, people would come and join, and it was just who could we get at the start that was going to ignite the fire.” Fran McGhie and Amy Cokayne were early signings, and Red Roses and England Sevens star Meg Jones was confirmed as a Tiger in May. It’s been fast learning for Meg, back full time in the 15-a-side game and straight into camp with the Red Roses, helping to redeem their World Cup final loss with a 33-12 victory over the Black Ferns to be crowned WXV 1 champions.
“I always wanted to come back for a World Cup, and with the competitive nature of the Red Roses and fifteens I had to get my foot in a little bit earlier,” explains Meg. “I’ve still got ambitions of going to the Olympics, so I’ll push back over to sevens as and when, and then I’ll jump back over to fifteens. It’s been a different transition to last time, because last time I did club first and I went into England, with new coaches and new moves to learn, but it was good.”
The community feel, much like at her old club Wasps, is what drew Meg to Tigers. “I don’t like it too shiny; I like it a bit rough around the edges,” she says. “Obviously the huge prestige of Tigers and the backing it gets from its fans, I love that. And it’s a new team, which means as players we can mould that in the way that we want to mould it.”
With Commonwealth Games and World Cup finals under her belt, Meg is one of the more experienced in this squad, despite only just turning 27. Her leadership was evident across the eighty minutes of Leicester’s match against Exeter, whether it was her stunning try, a dominant hit in defence or giving encouragement to her teammates. “I have attributes that are key leadership characteristics: I’m quite passionate, I don’t mind speaking in front of a group. But there’s other elements [to leadership]: you’ve got introverts who can lead from afar, so we’ve got a leadership group with myself, Tash, Amy, Lucy Nye, Roisin McBrien – so there’s a few of us that will create a culture and relay the messages. I’d like to consider myself a leader, but everyone is a leader in their own right.”
Knowing what wearing the Leicester Tigers shirt would mean for players like Tash, breaking that barrier became a passion for both Scott and Vicky. “Vicky came in and talked to us about her passion and what she wanted to do; [she was] very instrumental in that, coming in and saying she wanted to be part of the journey very early doors,” says Scott. “We sat upstairs in the clubhouse lounge and had a real one-to-one about how could we do this.”
A vital piece in the jigsaw fell into place when, in 2020, Andrea Pinchin replaced Simon Cohen as CEO. “You talk about strong female role models; we probably couldn’t have a better one. [She was] very passionate about delivering the equality piece across the game and representing opportunities for women in sport, so I had a very strong advocate in her to help drive this through. So we started to build a plan.” And this is where Lichfield come in.
“We had our first meeting, literally a blank piece of paper: we need to start a women’s team, what can we do?” recalls Vicky. “Tigers are one hundred per cent behind it but we know we’re late to the party, so what do we need to do? Myself and George Chuter [ex-England and Tigers hooker] sat in the room. He was helping out with forward coaching at the time at Lichfield, and we saw Lichfield as a starting point. We knew there was a sort of historical value at Lichfield; I was a former player myself, and they’ve done so much for the women’s game it was really important we got that legacy.”
“We’ve had very strong links with Lichfield for quite a while,” adds Scott. “Obviously, they missed out on getting in the Premiership, so we felt very strongly about supporting them. Then Covid hit, and all of a sudden Lichfield were struggling a bit with their women’s teams – at the time they’d gone down to about twenty girls – and we started talking to them a bit closer. It became obvious that we should get involved.”
The proposed model was hybrid in nature, one that would allow all the best Lichfield players to represent Leicester Tigers, but also to maintain and enhance Lichfield as a site for girls’ development. Initially, there was understandable hesitance from Lichfield – they didn’t want to simply be displaced. “We weren’t doing it to replace them, we were doing it to build Lichfield up and also create something special,” explains Scott. “I think our outcome has proved that, we’ve got a Lichfield – probably with about seventy girls now – that can put three sides out and is excelling.”
For Lichfield, it meant their first team moved down a league from Championship 1 North to Championship Midlands 2, the second team also shifted down a league, and so on. But this partnership doesn’t leave Lichfield high and dry; Tigers will support the club all the way through the age groups with coaching and will help launch Lichfield back into the Championship, after they just missed out this season. Lichfield as a whole benefit, and so do Tigers, with a steady hand on the tiller of future Tigers Women talent. With other links to Worcester, Henley and Kenilworth, plus three links at Leicester, De Monfort and Nottingham universities, Tigers have an eye on all the talent coming through in the Midlands.
There were some constitutional difficulties to work through, but for the 2021/22 Championship season a Lichfield Leicester Tigers team took the field for the first time. Coaching, development support and player recruitment were taken on by Tigers, the side finishing second in the table to Cheltenham with 71 points. The following season, they officially became Leicester Tigers Women for the first time, storming the league with eighteen wins from eighteen after being offered a place in the top tier in December following a successful tender process.
The core of their bid, unsurprisingly, had been the Tigers brand, a key aspect of which is their laser focus on sustainability. “It’s almost a positive that we’re coming in late to the game,” says Vicky. “I’ve been around for quite a while, seeing the ins and outs, and we were in a privileged position where we’ve seen what doesn’t work. We’ve seen what does work in the men’s game and we were able to take that to the party and say, ‘we’re absolutely going to make this women’s game financially stable’.
“We will bring sponsors, we will fill stadiums, we will create a sustainable pathway, that’s where we were coming from. We had full investment from the owners at the club: Andrea Pinchin, Scott Clark, Chris Rose [former chief marketing officer], they were crucial to show we had this professional edge to us that other clubs perhaps didn’t have access to.”
Given the current rugby climate, this would have been music to the ears of the new chiefs at PWR. With Warriors Women having to withdraw before the first weekend of the season due to their funding being pulled, Tigers’ community model is pragmatic but also necessary. “[Developing the women’s team] from a grassroots level up enabled us to do it with the right values and develop it with a sustainable approach. We’re going to get more and more people playing everywhere, not just for us,” continues Scott. “We’re going to help clubs get bigger, get more ladies into the game and get girls seeing a pathway locally, and then you trust that the rest will follow. You’re doing a lot of goodwill, a lot of people working extra hours, giving up another Saturday or Tuesday night, and people are willing to invest because it’s something we’re so passionate about. There’s never a shortage of that here at Tigers.”
But cashing in on commitment can only fund Tigers so far; tapping into the club’s established resources will be key to realising their sustainable model.
“Tigers, classically, our crowds are bigger than everybody else’s, so ultimately, we rely heavily on the support of a great fan base,” says Scott. “We had a great initial input from our season ticket holders where we gave them an option to be part of the women’s journey, and over 4,000 left in some extra funds. Already, we’ve got 4,500 season ticket holders that are investing in the women’s programme.
“If we are twice the average crowd on the men’s side,” continues Scott, “well, we’re hoping we’re going to be twice the average crowd on the women’s side, which makes us more viable straightaway. We’ve also got some great sponsors and partners at the club already who have jumped across. So, you’ve got two very sustainable inputs there, from our fanbase and our core partners, but that’s not everything; we’ve got a job to find more.”
When Rugby Journal visited Mattioli Woods Welford Road, we witnessed a battling 27-44 defeat against Exeter Chiefs, played in front of a decent crowd of eight hundred. “There’s a huge element of pride,” says senior coach Tom Hudson after the final whistle. A Tigers academy graduate and former Gloucester player, Tom began his coaching journey in Malaysia with Kuala Lumpur Tigers, a Leicester partner club, and also coached at Cheltenham Tigers Women and Ampthill before joining Tigers Women this year. “We went two tries down and people may have feared that the floodgates would have opened, but I thought we played some smart rugby at times, and equally I think we made it really easy for them in some areas.”
This show of resilience has Tom’s fingerprints all over it. While it was his time at Ampthill that lit his passion for top-level coaching, it’s from his formative years in Manchester, growing up in rugby league, that he draws most strongly. “It’s the spirit, the robustness, the toughness that the people in that rugby league bubble embody,” he says. “I think we’ve installed a Tigers DNA. I really feel [the crowd] gave us that point that we needed and deserved today, and arguments will be made that we deserved two points out of this. We proved we can move the ball and score tries and I hope that makes the league’s ears prick up.”
Meg Jones has already proven to be an astute signing. “She has made a huge impact on us and on our training regime,” says Tom. “Our challenge with Meg is letting her have freedom and fluidity to do what she does best, but also to be part of a fifteen-man game. I thought she rode that wave exceptionally well.”
Tigers’ introduction has been an immediate boost to the new PWR. Wasps and DMP Sharks, who are no longer involved, each shipped over a thousand points in the league last year, so for Leicester and fellow newcomers Trailfinders Women to perform so strongly on the opening weekend (the west Londoners were just beaten 17-22 by Harlequins) is a promising sign for competitive rugby across all corners of the 2023/24 PWR. The new league is a different beast from the last time new teams entered the fray back in 2020. “There won’t be any low-hanging fruit for us to pick this year,” continues Tom. “We’re going to have to work a lot harder and a lot smarter for much smaller gains.”
With Vicky as head of women’s rugby, Tom as senior coach, Luke Stratford looking after the forwards and Rocky Clark in charge of the set-piece, it’s a coaching team with a deep understanding of the women’s game. “Managerially there are such different challenges between men’s and women’s rugby,” Tom says. “As a man, obviously growing up in the man’s game, sometimes what your experiences are or how you were treated or what you think’s best doesn’t always fit, so very quickly you have to have the humility to realise things might not work in the women’s game.”
In a few words, what is the philosophy behind Tigers Women? “Physically robust, mentally relentless,” he says. “We are going to come up against sides better than us this season, that is a fact, so what are we going to take out of games? Is it that we’re going to make them work for fifteen phases to get that try, is it aiming for four tries every game? Is it taking a point out of every game? We have to be realistic, because with realism comes sustainable growth. We don’t have anything to lose.”
Story by James Price
Pictures by Gemma Porter
This extract was taken from issue 23 of Rugby.
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