The women’s league structure, which was comprehensively overhauled for the 2014-15 season, sees further tweaks for the 15/16 season as the overall number of teams competing increases from 22-25 across three leagues. Despite the HKRU’s indifference to women’s rugby, it’s been the fastest growing area of the sport locally for several years and with Hong Kong’s women 7s winning in Qingdao recently there’s a lot of excitement ahead of the new season, which starts on 3 October.
The Premiership has grown from six to seven teams with HK Football Club Ice moving up to the top rung of local women’s rugby. The other participating Premiership teams are defending champions Valley Black, Gai Wu, USRC Tigers, Kowloon, SCAA Causeway Bay and Tai Po Dragons. Women’s Rugby Performance Manager Jo Hull and Women’s Rugby Development Manager Sam Feausi are looking to increase that to eight in the 2016/17 season.
One step below Premiership level, the National 15s League has grown by three teams to 11 with HK Scottish, SCAA Causeway Bay 3rds and Revolution joining the competition this season. The National 10s League will feature six teams and continues its role as a bridge for new and younger players looking to integrate into 15-aside competition.
The main change to this season’s competition is the introduction of a new internal representative competition: the Women’s Rugby Super Series – designed to bridge the gap between domestic rugby and the national XVs set-up.
“The Super Series will feature our top 66 players from the domestic league. These players will be split into three Barbarian sides which will play against each other, effectively adding a component of representative rugby apart from the domestic league and just below the national setup. The goal is to better prepare and help transition players to full representative rugby,” said Sam Feausi.
Feausi added that, “The Super Series will give coaches and selectors an opportunity to look at our best players and test combinations with an eye on the coming international season. The teams will primarily be drawn from the Premiership with selectors identifying any players from other competitions that we believe have what it takes to represent the National Team. The Super Series will give more opportunities to the best players in the Premiership to play at an even higher level.”
“We are focused on introducing more of a performance aspect into our women’s club system this season. The Premiership is the pinnacle of Women’s rugby and we want it to be geared towards high performance, as we are ultimately targeting qualification for Women’s Rugby World Cup in future.” said Jo Hull.
The three leagues promise to serve up some incredible rugby with defending champions Valley Black and perennial contenders Gai Wu shaping up as the favourites once again in the Premiership race. Gai Wu have 11 players involved with the national sevens team, Valley Black have nine. SCAA Causeway Bay is the only club to field a team in all three of the senior woman’s competitions.
“This is set to be the biggest club woman’s competition we have ever had in Hong Kong,” said Feausi. “With 25 teams across three highly competitive leagues it will be interesting to see who will be pushing hard for a place in the Premiership and spots in the Super Series teams. On the other end of the scale, we will be monitoring how successful clubs are at introducing beginners and less experienced players to rugby and transitioning them from National 10s to higher levels of competition.”
The Women’s Premiership will kick off on 3 October as part of the HKRU Super Saturday league launch at Kings Park. The National 15’s and Women’s 10s also kick-off this weekend and you can find the complete fixture list here.
Source HKRU, image courtesy of HKRU
