A rarity as a female Director of Rugby in the men's game, Stacia Long has a strong record of broadening participation in the game she loves. She discusses her experience, and her own unusual journey in rugby union.
Stacia Long laughs as she recounts being mistaken for the team physio when she introduces herself to referees.
“I don’t take offence at all, I think it’s funny,” she says. “They’re always so apologetic, and we have a laugh about it. I’m one woman among hundreds of men.”
Long is Director of Rugby (DoR) at Old Rutlishians (Old Ruts), a Surrey Division One club based in Wimbledon. As a female DoR she would be rare in the women’s game, let alone the men’s, but the story of how she worked her way there – having joined the club as physio more than a decade ago – is far more unusual than such headlines suggest.
In 2008, whilst working as a PE teacher at Graveney School in South West London, a 13-year-old schoolboy approached her during a lesson.
“He said, ‘Me and a few others play rugby outside school and would love to have a school team.’” she remembers. “I told him I knew nothing about rugby but would drive the minibus, organise fixtures: whatever they needed.”
The schoolboy, Kyle Sinckler, was already showing promise in club rugby.
“Kyle had this air of confidence about him,” she says. “He just said, ‘I will do it all Miss, don’t worry,’ and that was it.”
At the time, Long’s experience of rugby was limited to her occasional role as physio, watching for injuries rather than to learn tactics.
“I realised I was being sent on with messages,” she says. “I’d just say, ‘I have no idea what that means, but OK!’ and eventually I started to learn a little about the game.”
Long’s husband agreed to referee the school matches. When he saw they had some good players, he agreed to educate Long in the sport’s details.
“We would watch whatever rugby was on TV,” she says. “He would pause it and explain what the players were doing. That’s how I learnt the game.”
At the first tournament with “Kyle’s team”, she was told the coaches also had to referee.
“I didn’t have the guts to tell the organiser I had no idea what the game was even meant to look like,” she says. “Another coach just said, ‘pretend you are injured and I will ref matches for you’. For three years I had a ‘rogue injury’ to give me time to learn the rules.”
At a state school like Graveney, it would be challenging to build a competitive team in a sport dominated by private schools with fields, equipment, and a supportive parent community familiar with the game’s risks. Long took a creative approach.
“We set up a school-club link with Old Ruts that created a perfect storm,” she explains. “It boosted the numbers at the club, so we had a really good team, training and playing [regularly]. In state schools, you rely on two or three kids who can play, the rest kind of pick it up. But all of a sudden we had a school team that knew how to play rugby.
Long is quick to emphasise how anyone who wants to play rugby, regardless of their background, is welcomed and adopted by the club they join, but realises that for many, the cost and lack of facilities are a blockage. Old Ruts offered the school a pitch, and Long worked hard to make sure that anyone who wanted to play was able to.
“We started a silent sponsor program, where parents could pay the membership for their kid plus another who couldn’t afford it,” she tells me. “It was all really discreet. We had a little club shop with a donation box for when kids grew out of their boots, so anyone who couldn’t afford boots could take some.”
At Graveney, Sinckler had moved on by the time Long took a chance and entered the u-15s for the prestigious NatWest Cup. In the early rounds they beat traditionally powerful schools, but lost in the third round to regular winners, Whitgift.
“It was their home game, five-hundred kids and parents watching,” she laments. “We rocked up in the minibus and lost 29-26. Nobody else got that close to them until they lost in the semi-final.”
Their journey continued in the vase competition, and the rugby community stepped in again as Saracens offered their pitch for the quarter-final, which Graveney duly won. On the eve of the semi-final, many of the team were excited about staying in a hotel for the first time. Sadly, they were confronted with tragic circumstance. A teacher, and tutor to half the players, died suddenly.
“They were absolutely devastated,” she says. “He had promised them he’d come to watch, and for a lot of them it was their first experience of losing somebody.”
They held a team meeting, and decided they would play for him. Long worried about the pressure; if they lost, and missed out on the final at Twickenham, would they feel they had let him down?
“We said he was there with them, so they had sixteen men on the field that day,” she says. “I’ve never seen a team play their best rugby like that. That was their final. Seeing those boys become men was incredible.”
The final itself saw her team go down 12-10 in front of an intimidating crowd of ten thousand, but the experience had been life-changing, and several players wanted to follow Sinckler to a scholarship at a rugby-playing school.
“They said ‘we want to do that’, so you saw those kids all sitting together in the library, helping each other because they wanted good GCSE grades,” she says. “Kyle’s legacy wasn’t just rugby.”
Several of the team have now drifted from playing, but she takes pride in the story of Victor Nzelele, whom she introduced to the game as an 11-year-old.
“He never had much support,” she says. “He broke his finger once, and I sat in A&E until 4am. Now he plays in the 1st XV at Ruts and is top try scorer. He loves it, and has done it all on his own.”
Long feels rugby clubs can still do more to break down the barriers for state-school kids like Victor, but she is sympathetic to the challenges of spreading the game with its dangers, complex laws, and need for specialist coaching in the basics.
“We showed you can do it, the talent is there, but it comes down to clubs,” she says. “At the school, where would we have put a rugby pitch? How could we have got rugby on the curriculum when PE is taught in mixed-sex classes? Lots of parents think it is dangerous, and ultimately, loads of the kids want to play football. It’s as simple as that.”
She is humble in describing her position at “a level 10 club nowhere near the top”, and similarly bullish in insisting that rugby has never held her back as a female in the men’s game.
“Did I have any difficulty getting to that position? Absolutely not,” she says. “I was encouraged to go on coaching courses because they want more females. Ninety-nine per cent of the courses I go on I’m the only woman. Have I ever been made to feel unwelcome? Never. Everyone has encouraged me, pushed me, given me the confidence to do what I want.”
And she hopes that, just as when schoolboy Victor saw Kyle, the star, forge a path, so other women will draw inspiration from her.
“As a female coach I don’t want to be given a job because I’m a female – I would find that derogatory – I want it to be because I’m the best person for the job,” she says. “For me it is about offering the opportunities; that is what we can do in rugby. Then it’s up to them.”
In 2012, the RFU launched the All Schools programme, to increase the number of state schools playing rugby. The model they have developed looks familiar: kit, equipment, coaching, and, importantly, strong links to local clubs. By 2019, over seven hundred schools had been introduced to rugby through the initiative.
As those at the top of the game seek to broaden its appeal as a sport for everybody, they will do well to study closely the stories of Sinckler, and Nzelele, and could do much worse than to consult Stacia Long. She knows more than most.
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When Stacia Long's "boys became men": Graveney School vs St Georges College Weybridge - NatWest Schools Cup 2014 - U15 Vase Semi-Final