Seventy Girls and a Corner of Grass: Launching Tonga's First Schoolgirls' Rugby Programme

Vincent Lin | Trinity College Dublin | Mathematics and Economics | Cohort LL25 

The strangest sales pitch of my life took place in a classroom in Nuku'alofa. The product was rugby; the customers were teenage girls who, until three weeks earlier, had been banned by law from playing it.

That law — which barred girls in Tongan state schools from contact sport — was repealed just before I landed. It is hard to overstate what that means in Tonga, where rugby is the national game, a shared inheritance, and one of the few reliable roads to a scholarship or a professional contract abroad. For generations, that road had been open to half the country and closed to the other half. Working with the Tonga Rugby Union and Tonga High School, my Leadership-in-Action project was to design and lead the first girls' rugby programme in a state school: a pilot which, if it worked, the Union hoped to roll out nationwide. So I went from classroom to classroom making my pitch, privately hoping that twenty girls might give it a go.

Around seventy came — barefoot, in school uniform, from every year group, spilling onto the corner of pitch I had managed to negotiate from the hundred boys who trained on the rest of it. My greatest worry, that nobody would turn up, did not survive its first afternoon.

So how do you coach seventy beginners with no staff, and with balls and cones that had to be borrowed? Improvisation, mostly. I ran everything in circuits so that nobody stood still, and turned the handful of girls who could already catch and pass into coaches for the many who could not. (Most could not — the sport had, after all, been off-limits to them for their whole lives.) Over the first week the crowd settled into a committed core of about forty, split into under-14 and under-16 squads, and we trained four or five times a week — some eighteen sessions in all on our hard-won corner of grass.

Off the field, the work spread in directions my proposal had never imagined. The Union had been keeping track of the country's players on handwritten lists, so I built them a player-management database from scratch — for the first time, a single place to see and develop talent across every village, club and school. I drew up their application for a World Rugby development grant. I taught their staff to use AI for the admin that had been eating their week. And on evenings when I was not coaching, I trained the school's first debate team in how to build an argument; they went out and won the national senior title (a sentence I will be dining out on for years).

I was the youngest adult on the field and the only foreigner in the staff room; being trusted anyway — with another school's pupils and the country's national game — never stopped feeling remarkable. Somewhere in all of that, I stopped thinking of the programme as mine — which is just as well, because the best part of this project is the part I will not be there to see. Of the four teachers who came to help along the way, three have committed to keep coaching after I leave, with the vice-principal and the parents behind them. The girls already run their own games in the open minutes I leave at the end of each session. There is a written Playbook of drills, sessions and safety routines that anyone can lift off the shelf, and a database that strengthens every team in the country rather than one school's. In three weeks, the under-14s and under-16s will travel to their first full-contact tournament — and they will go with or without me, which was always the design.

If the pilot becomes the template the Union hopes for, then somewhere down the years a girl at a school I will never visit will pull on a jersey for the first time. I will never meet her. She is what I came for — and what this scholarship, at its best, is for.