Trailfinders Women
After nipping at the heels of the men’s Premiership to no avail, it’s in the women’s game that Ealing will finally get to taste top-flight rugby. Gaining entry before they’d even played a single game of rugby, Trailfinders Women could prove to be the making of the west London club.
Since the days of the Roman Empire, the colour purple has been worn as a symbol of power, wealth and ambition. Then, requiring around twelve thousand Lebanese native snails to produce the dye, it was so expensive that purple robes became the preserve of the wealthiest and, eventually, were reserved exclusively for emperors. And yet for some reason, despite all this wonderful symbolism and back story, few modern sports teams have adopted this most regal of colours. Even for those who have, most famously the Italian football club Fiorentina, it was the result of a red and white shirt-washing mishap. In rugby it’s rarely seen, bar England’s 1980s tracksuits and a late noughties alternative strip.
So, when Trailfinders Women revealed their first ever home kit adorned with details of purple, a slightly altered design to the men’s, was director of rugby Giselle Mather attempting to instil the spirit of the Roman empire in her legion? “Purple is my thing, look,” says Giselle, her purple-painted fingernails digging into her pocket to pull out her phone, turning it over to reveal a purple-coloured case. The purple charms on her bracelet add further confirmation it’s her favourite colour, but the motivation behind the kit goes deeper. “The idea was to have us be together, but different [from the men],” she continues. “The home shirt is obviously traditionally green and white, but I wanted to add a little difference, and the purple goes beautifully with green. It aligns us, but gives us that point of difference, and it allows young female athletes to buy a female shirt.”
Trailfinders Women have yet to play their first game, but Giselle is already leaving an indelible mark. That tends to be how she operates; with a touch as deft as Midas, the difference she affects is immediate, whether it’s winning World Cup finals for England as a player, back-to-back titles as Wasps coach in the early 2000s or triple promotions and a 62-game unbeaten run with Teddington. Ironically, trailblazing is her speciality; in a journey of many firsts, Giselle was the first women to earn level three and four coaching badges and the first to have a full-time coaching role at a Premiership club.
But even with a CV as varied as hers, this opportunity at Trailfinders Women is something unique. Not just the fact she’s building a top-flight team from scratch (we’ve seen that done with great success in recent years down in Exeter) but she’s doing it at a club that’s only entered the rugby consciousness in the last five years. At Exeter, Susie Appleby had the resources and experiences of European champions to tap into, in a part of the country where rugby surpasses football in popularity. Ealing, however, aren’t even a Premiership club, in fact they’ve been rejected from that league twice, and average just over a thousand fans a game. In this context, attracting a coach of Giselle’s stature is quite the coup.
Making the move from Wasps, one of the pioneers of women’s rugby in this country and the club where she grew up, played and coached, it takes courage to join a club with no history in elite women’s rugby and no guarantee of a place in the league, let alone any players. “I have a heart that beats around Wasps, and that will never change,” reflects Giselle. “I grew up with that club, my father played for that club, so part of me and my being will always have that, and everybody understands that. But I will carry that beating heart into Trailfinders Women now.
“I had been at Wasps for five years as the only full-time member of staff, but the Premier 15s as it was then just got bigger and bigger, too big for one person. I had amazing staff, but I was exhausted, absolutely exhausted and I couldn’t deliver. So Ealing came to me and said, ‘we’ve got this proposition, we want to bid for the league when it comes up’. The bid process was just about to happen, so they put that to me … I’d done it before for Wasps, so I knew what I was doing.
“I had a three-stage plan,” she continues. “The first was to put the bid in, so that was September to December. We got announced [as one of the successful clubs], so the second stage was December to July where I’m recruiting a full staff team, full athletic team, everything.”
It’s a fledgling group she’s assembled, but there’s no shortage of talent; former Red Rose and Bristol Bears head coach Kim Oliver, Oli Bishop, who spent almost a decade at Wasps, and the experienced Pat Metcalfe-Jones, also of Wasps. Trailfinders men’s captain Barney Maddison and men’s forwards coach Brett Wilkinson will cross over to take charge of forwards and set piece. “And now I’m into stage three,” she continues, “which is about preparing the team. Then the dial gets reset, and it’s all about competing.”
When the competition does come it will be tough, much tougher even than when this league welcomed Exeter and Sale three years ago. Trailfinders haven’t been dealt an easy hand either, their first two fixtures coming against two local rivals Harlequins and Saracens – the only two clubs to have won the Premier 15s before Gloucester-Hartpury lifted the trophy last season. The level of competition is a world away from when Giselle started out with Wasps six years ago. In her words, it’s “chalk and cheese”.
“In year one, two and three, some games were pretty much foregone conclusions, but that’s not the case anymore,” she says. “I believe this season is going to produce some unbelievable games. It’s not going to be predetermined, it’s going to be what we do on the day. And when you get to that stage, that is when the fans are going to come through the door, and how exciting is that as a coach?”
For a personality like Giselle, confronting the challenges is what motivates her. Building from scratch at a club like Ealing is not a rash undertaking but an opportunity. “When in your coaching career do you start something completely fresh, to compete at the highest level you can as a club side, right from scratch? I mean, it’s so exciting.” Her most exciting job yet? “Good question. I always get fully invested in everything that I do, so to say one is better than another? One is different from another, yes, but this is desperately exciting and very unique.”
The emergence of Trailfinders onto the women’s scene is the latest chapter in an ever-meandering rugby story at Ealing. Founded in 1871, if it wasn’t for their representatives’ detour to the pub on the way to the foundational meeting of the RFU, perhaps things could have been different for the west London club. Fighting for eyeballs with the neighbouring Harlequins, Saracens, Richmond, London Scottish and Rosslyn Park, as well as Wasps and London Irish in the past, such competition has limited the value of their stock. Or at least, that was true until a decade ago. With the help of vast investment from owner Sir Mike Gooley, believed to be north of £20 million, a run of promotions has seen their men’s first team not just move into the Championship but grow into one of its fiercest competitors, claiming the title in the 2021/22 season.
However, what would usually be a moment of utter jubilation was somewhat soured by the fact that, despite dominating the league, Ealing would not be promoted into the Premiership, their Vallis Way ground failing to meet the 10,001 capacity minimum standard. Last season the RFU once again rejected their application for promotion, and Ealing were pipped to the title by Jersey Reds after leading the league for almost the entire season. This coming season there will be a new two-legged promotion play-off with the bottom Premiership side for the Championship winner, but the minimum criteria will still need to be met. At the third time of asking, do Ealing have plans in place to secure their rightful spot in the top division? “There is no plan at the moment to build to ten thousand,” reveals Ben Ward, who occupies the dual role of managing director and men’s director of rugby. “We don’t think there’s any justification in doing so. So, whether those regulations change … it’s not just about building seats, you’ve got Premiership shares too if you want to buy them.
“What is the Premiership worth at the moment, you’ve just lost three sides?” he continues. “With my director of rugby hat on, those questions don’t come in to play unless we win the league. With my managing director hat on, there are so many exciting things going on, that success can be measured in many ways, and we’re really proud of what we’re doing.
“The one thing I felt we got caught up in last year, we’ve had this dream [of promotion] for a number of years, and once that was taken away from us, we found it quite hard to continue in the season,” admits Ben. “I love what I do. I love coming to work. I love the challenges, so I think there’s so much that we can achieve. And I’ve probably started to look more at what we can control. So, if we can’t control that side of it … what does success look like for us? Potentially, this year, it’s competing.
“They [building the stadium] are not my decisions to make, they are Sir Mike Gooley’s decisions. He’s an extremely successful businessman and will always make very good decisions. I know, as a club, we’ve had a bit more seating installed this year. The ground will improve every year, that’s the owner’s mentality.”
Unless, as Ben is hoping, the RFU regulations change, it looks like Premiership promotion will once again be beyond Ealing’s reach this season, and as a result Ben has resigned himself to moving the goalposts of success. Despite Ben’s position as managing director, it seems Sir Mike is the sole author of the future of the club with no sub-editors in sight.
Looping the narrative back to Trailfinders Women, Ben’s key focus this season (with his managing director hat on this time) will be to grow the support base of the club, and the women’s side will play a significant part in that. “We need to increase our attendances to justify increased seating,” he continues. “We want to hit around two thousand spectators a game from both the men’s and the women’s, and I think that’s achievable, but it’s about getting that visibility. Five years ago, nobody knew who Ealing Trailfinders were, now that’s slightly different.
“Ealing has around 370,000 people so we want to get some of those people to our games, but there’s a lot of people that still don’t know about us as a rugby club in the town. There’s a lot of things we do really well, it’s probably just becoming more visible. I want people to know who our players are, I want young females in Ealing to know about Abby Dow and the type of girls they can aspire to be. I think when you watch the women’s internationals now with the ball-in-play time it’s exciting, so that’s why we started on that journey.”
And it was a journey that began long before the arrival of Giselle, about three years earlier in fact. It wasn’t a case of thumb-twiddling for the bidding process to come around; instead the club got to work meticulously building a holistic programme. “The challenge for us was that every other side was either established as a men’s Premiership side or they had a team in the Premier 15s,” reveals Ben. “So, where everybody else was having to deal with winning games at the top level, and then decide to build down, we looked at it three years ago and thought let’s build from the bottom and build upwards.”
Academy pathways were established at Henley College and Cardinal Newman (in Hove) which feed into the Trailfinders Rugby Academy at Brunel University. Each programme is wrapped around the players, allowing them to study but also giving access to coaching, S&C and medics. Already, three of Giselle’s squad are products of these pathways. “For us it was a slightly back-to-front way compared to everyone else,” says Ben, “but I think actually that may in the future serve us well, that we’ve built really good foundations.”
The fruit of these pathways will prove invaluable in the context of the new Premiership Women’s Rugby era; the ten teams competing this season are part of a ten-year plan, and the Trailfinders Women of the future are already being crafted. “We are not re-tendering again in three years’ time,” says Giselle. “This is now a set group. It has room for expansion if that’s what we believe is necessary and other clubs are ready to go. Now we can actually invest in the product and push it forward and know that you’re not going to [lose your place].”
With the future stability of Trailfinders Women assured, assembling a squad was the final and rather significant piece in the jigsaw. Starting with a bang, their first announcement was the signing of Red Rose and certified global superstar Abby Dow. Was she Giselle’s first phone call? “Might have been,” she replies with a smile. “Abby is an amazing athlete; I’ve worked with her for six years [at Wasps]. She’s fantastic, she grows year on year, there’s still so much more to come from Abs. The growth in her as a human and as a person is unbelievable, but how she hands people off and just goes fast is something to behold each time and I’m still in awe of it.
“With Abby, we have developed a very strong coach-athlete relationship in which she understands what I’m looking for,” continues Giselle. “I understand how she ticks and as a result the process works both ways. She’s brilliant with the younger athletes, they obviously all look up to her as she’s one of the best players in the world. And I will have two or three of those.”
Giselle won’t reveal any more, but a few days after we speak the announcement of the signing of USA Eagle Kate Zachary from Exeter sends women’s rugby social media into a frenzy. Internationals from across the globe have already joined, from Japan to Canada to France, but a few more signings of that calibre could well be on the way before the season begins.
Unsurprisingly, Abby is not the only former Wasp to reunite with Giselle. Wasps captain and Red Rose Liz Crake was next to be announced, and more than ten former players have also left the nest and made the short journey east. One of those, via a detour to Exeter Chiefs, is Charlie Willett. “I knew what I was getting into working with Giselle, but the vibe at Trailfinders really is completely different from anything I’ve ever experienced before,” she says. “Giselle is great, a little bit mad. Our thing this year is ‘In the Gap’, like that moment when you let go of a trapeze to jump onto another trapeze, and we found out yesterday we’re going to learn how to trapeze as part of pre-season. It’s that kind of thing, pushing you out of your comfort zone.
“But she cares so much about each individual. I think the focus on bringing us together as a group, I’ve not experienced that before in performance sport. I’ve seen it in community sport, but I think in a performance environment I’ve not seen this level. Exeter was a great time for me because it was my first time in a full-time professional rugby environment, but ethos-wise Exeter is performance-first and for my development as an athlete, I wanted somewhere that was a bit more person-first. And I think Giselle definitely has that, so when I’d seen that she was joining Trailfinders there was a little bit of me that was like, ‘God, I’d love to play for them.’”
Charlie’s people-first partiality make sense when you learn that before becoming a full-time player, she was living a very different life as an Oxford-educated lawyer. It was in her final year of studying that she found rugby, playing at Twickenham in only her sixth game, but balancing her career and her passion was a struggle. “I did the classic training contract route where I was working in the city, and at the same time I was playing for Richmond when they were in the Premiership. My life was mad. I was getting up at half five in the morning to be in the gym for six. I’d be working from nine in the morning often through until midnight, getting a cab home and just rinsing and repeating. I don’t think you realise when you’re in it how crazy that is, so Covid was actually great for me because it gave me a chance to reframe what I wanted to do.”
Charlie moved into sports law and, trying to find more balance in her life, found a company that let her work part time and remotely when she moved down to Exeter, a rarity in the world of law. However, with any high-pressure career, part time was not really part time. “I felt like for my first year at Exeter I was doing two things,” she says, “not badly, but I wasn’t being a great lawyer or a great rugby player. I think it was in that time period I decided I don’t just want to be any rugby player, I want to be a great rugby player, so I took the leap.”
However, gearing up for her second year in Exeter, Charlie suffered a horrendous leg injury playing for Rugby League Ireland, tearing her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and cartilage on both sides of her knee and dislocating her femur. The injury itself was traumatic enough, but what followed was unimaginable. She had been told that medical cover would be provided, only to find out after that cover extended to just £3,000 for what was £14,000 surgery.
“The day I got injured is the worst I felt in my entire life,” recalls Charlie. “I knew my ACL was gone immediately. I heard screaming and it took me a second to figure out it was me. “Coming off the field, knowing that it was such a major injury, knowing the consequences of that, I asked the coach how I sort out the medical for this and he said, ‘I don’t think we’ll cover it.’ My heart fell out my chest. I’ve never felt so alone in my entire life.”
With no other option, Charlie was forced to set up a GoFundMe page, a difficult and poignant moment. But from something so awful sprung something incredible. “I put up a post on TikTok on the Friday night, and by Saturday morning, it raised £10,000,” she recalls. “I cried a lot; I still want to cry now. Because I’d felt so let down by the Rugby League Ireland set-up, I didn’t think that people cared about me, I didn’t think that I was worthy, so just having all of that support immediately was insane, really overwhelming. The rugby community came together to help me pay that, which was insane.”
Still heavily strapped, Charlie is nine months, two weeks and three days post operation as we speak, “Not that I’m counting or anything, but I’m definitely counting!” She’s feeling stronger than ever and couldn’t be more thankful to Trailfinders. “I didn’t think that I’d be able to sign for new club injured so I’m also really grateful to them for taking a chance on me. There’s not that many clubs that would take that risk and let me crack on. My timeline is around like eleven or twelve months, which should mean I’m back for the first game of the season. I’ve had a lot of people ask, ‘do you want to go back, are you afraid?’, but there is nothing that would stop me taking the field again.”
In nine months, Trailfinders Women has grown from concept to reality. While there’s still a while to go before their first competitive fixture against Harlequins in the Allianz Cup on 30 September, the squad is beginning to look settled. Already stacked with international talent, what can we expect from this Trailfinders team? “I’m not putting numbers on it, but we are going to be competitive,” insists Giselle. “I want us to play an exciting expansive game of rugby, I want every single one of my athletes to love being at Trailfinders Women and really enjoy coming. We want to set a standard for where women’s sport, not just women’s rugby, can go, in how it looks after its athletes and how it provides for its athletes.”
Does she think they will surprise people? “That depends on each person’s expectation of us, but as a new outfit yes, I think we will. If people really know the athletes and what they’re capable of and know my competitive nature, I don’t know that they would be overly surprised. I have nine fabulous opponents and I massively respect that, so it’s not entirely in my control, but my job is to focus on my group. If table placings get higher and higher due to the processes I’ve put in, that’s great. But I have my own success criteria.”
With all of their assets, from players to coaches to finances, the ceiling for Trailfinders Women is certainly high. That being said, you can’t put a price on a positive culture and environment. “From my perspective, it’s the trust I’ve been given from Ben and Sir Mike ... they’ve just let me crack on with it. That makes it absolutely awesome because they are so supportive. The overriding thing for me is how much we are welcome at the club. If I go to them with an idea, they go ‘okay, but can we make it better than that?’ They look into the ideas, explore them and then magnify them. That’s what the club is all about.”
Story by James Price
Pictures by Danté Kim
This extract was taken from issue 23 of Rugby.
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