Annual Award
Through its partnership with the British & Irish Lions, Royal London Group has created the Championing Women and Girls’ Rugby Award, which celebrates outstanding initiatives by grassroots clubs to support women’s rugby in their communities.
Each year, one club from each Home Union is awarded with a special trophy, plus a €11,800^ (£10,000) grant to further invest in their women and girls’ programmes. By celebrating and showcasing these spearheading clubs, we also hope to inspire others to achieve more.
We had over 120 applications for the 2024 award showcasing some fantastic clubs across the UK and Ireland. Our winners all demonstrated:
- Innovative ways to engage their local communities
- Initiatives to improve access to playing
- Equality across the club both on and off the pitch
- Celebration of women's success beyond annual awards
- Clearly established pathways for progression of players as well as coaches, staff and leadership at all levels
- Recognition of what they still need to do to continue championing women and girls’ rugby and clearly articulated the measurable impact the grant will have on achieving this.
Read more about our 2024 winners below.
Applications for the 2025 award are now closed and the winners will be announced later in the year.
^ Amount is based on 16 May 2005 exchange rate of £10,000
Video Transcript
Sorcha Mac Laimhin: Trust the person on that side of you to get up and make a touch, so that you’ve got the last person.
My name is Sorcha Mac Laimhin, and I'm a volunteer here at Cooke Rugby Club. And this is my daughter Meave, and she’s two.
With the funding from Royal London, we were able to start a beginner’s programme, which we’ve called Touch to Tackle, and that’s a programme for mum’s and beginners to introduce them to rugby.
Raissa Balduino: The community you build with rugby, it’s the bet one, and after doing this, it’s really true, like I was looking forward to every Monday just to get in there, seeing the girls and just having a great time.
Erin Brennan: Coming here, meeting these girls, they’re so lovely, and it’s good for fitness, it’s good for community, it’s all positive really, yeah.
Sorcha Mac Laimhin: It was inspired by the fact that we’ve got quite a lot of mums playing here at the club, and in fact we had a match last season and one of the girls was coming back from maternity leave, and she brought her little girl with her to the match, and naturally she was a bit anxious about having her baby on the side of at the side of the pitch while she was playing, and we were all trying to reassure her, you know, we’ve got Sorcha’s a mum, Alana’s a mum, Jane’s a mum, somebody will be there. And we sort of realised we have enough people here actually to make a sevens team. So that sort of inspired the idea.
I just really love getting more people into rugby, and particularly women and girls. It’s a sport that I’ve really enjoyed playing, and that I’ve really benefitted from, and I just want more people to be able to access that. And I guess I hope in the future that Maeve will get to play rugby at some point.
It’s been really great to see them develop over the course of eight weeks. So when they first turned up, none of them had ever played rugby before, and we started just with like really basic skills like catch, pass, and things like that. Now, you know, they’re starting to identify space, they’re communicating really effectively. Just today I think it will be really exciting to see them put it all together and really enjoy playing a match.
The Royal London grant has just really accelerated what we’re able to do. We’ve got 15 brand new players, which we would have struggled to recruit without that extra funding to help us run the programme. I just think the support from Royal London has been amazing. It just demonstrates that this is a really valuable asset, and you should be investing in women’s sports because the impact that you can have in local communities is just incredible, and it’s really wide reaching. I mean it just gives me hope for the future that we’ll just see women and girls rugby continue to grow and to flourish.