Women rugby set for exponential growth

Sports Reporter

ZIMBABWE Rugby Union have used the current lockdown to revamp their structures and come up with a raft of policies to grow the game.

They want to spread it to the previously-marginalised areas.

In a newsletter, the union said, they will use this time to introduce compulsory mentoring programmes where all senior men’s teams must have a woman sitting on their first team’s technical bench.

The women will be either the assistant coach or an understudy of the head coach.

“The management team, for all women’s teams must, with immediate effect, have at least two women in influential decision-making positions.

“To ensure that the women in these positions aren’t just figureheads, without the technical grounding, the Union resolved to capacity develop the women’s ranks by ensuring that, for all training and education programmes, women will have a reserved quota of places for women across all the programmes delivered by the world rugby educators across all strands.

“All registered provincial teams have women’s teams, plans are at an advanced stage to introduce the Women’s Super Six League in 2021.

“With the appointment of the high-performance team coaches, the ZRU is finalising the contracts for the engagement of twenty women to be on contract with the Union.

“The women will be the nucleus of the national women’s Sables and Cheetahs teams.’’