S2 E1: Mya Walker-Humphreys & Ruby Dymmock-Morgan

So before we get into it, as we normally do, I thought we'd have a couple of quick reflections on what's happened in the offseason.

I think there's two important points to acknowledge.

The first one being the cancellation of the first round of games.

the league.

So in everyone's diaries, the league was actually meant to start last weekend on the weekend of the 19th and the 20th of September.

However, the RFU announced sort of midway through August that they were pushing back the start of the league by one week due to ongoing concerns about drought and hardness of pitchers.

And yeah, basically this directly affects women's championship.

So I don't know how much you know about the infrastructure and the regulations of rugby in England under the RFU.

But in the men's game, tiers one to four are independently regulated and infrastructured.

So you have the Prem, you have the Champ, you have Nat 1 and Nat 2 under the National Leagues.

And so all of those four leagues are slightly self-determining in their regulations.

And the RFU works with them on like a consulting relationship basis, but they can make independent decisions.

And then everything below tier four is under the term grassroots rugby in England.

And that has one set of rules that applies across all of those.

So this is not the same in the women's game.

In the women's game, you have the PWR, which is tier one.

And then the championship in tier 2 and then champ 2 in tier 3

etc etc

but the PWR is self-determining its regulations but everything below tier 1 which includes us in championship and tier 2 comes under the jurisdiction of grassroots rugby so when they decided to push back the league by a week that affects us And you could say, oh, what's the impact of this? Well, the impact of this is you've got to rearrange 10 fixtures across the summer before the deadline of the semifinals and the finals, which are already set in place in March and April, respectively.

So this is a big logistical issue for clubs, especially when you're organising players, especially when you're organising transport and you're organising your women's team amongst the logistics of clubs.

the operations of your your men's and your juniors as well so that's been a big operations management struggle I think behind the scenes but I think from us in a reporting point of view it means the league's going to look a little bit different this year if you've played championship before you know that they usually do it two weeks on one week off for a rest two weeks on one week off for a rest And so for us, we had this whole plan that we would have two weeks on for reporting full episodes of the podcast, yada, yada, yada.

And then we'd have a week off.

But because of those rescheduled fixtures, which have been sort of reorganized by club, club by club, it's not like everyone's organized on one week.

Reporting for us is going to look a lot more ad hoc and there's going to be a lot more sort of random rugby games each week.

It's not like you're going to get five whole fixtures for each of the Championship North and the Championship South each week.