Canadian rugby captain Jen Kish, as most athletes here do, wants to leave the Pan Am Games with a gold medal around her neck. But her entire rugby sevens team also wants to win something far less tangible while they’re here in Toronto: the support of a nation.

That’s what the women’s soccer team won at the London Olympics, along with its bronze medal, and, as a consequence, played to packed crowds on home soil at the FIFA Women’s World Cup last month.

“To see how the women’s soccer team has bloomed from medalling in the last Olympics, it’s amazing and we’re very envious of that. We always say to each other, ‘That’s going to be us one day,’ ” Kish said.

“As rugby continues to build in Canada and people start to learn rugby and get excited about it come Rio, where we have a good potential of medalling, I think the same thing will happen.”

This is the debut of women’s rugby in any multi-sport Games and, for many Canadians, the first taste of what they could see during the 2016 Rio Olympic tournament. Canada’s women have already qualified to play there.

But the very thing that made the sevens game so appealing to the International Olympic Committee — the speed of the game and its short tournaments — doesn’t give players much time to develop new fans.

In the recent FIFA Women’s World Cup, the Canadians played five soccer matches over three weeks. This weekend, at the Pan Am Games, Canada’s rugby players will hit the pitch for that many matches in just two days. Then, all being well, their sixth match will be Sunday night for the gold medal.

The men’s two-day sevens tournament runs alongside the women’s matches at Exhibition Stadium.

“It’s bang for your buck,” Kish said, of their speedy and action-filled tournament days.

“If you have a short attention span, it’s a great sport for you.”

Each game is 14 minutes long except for the gold-medal round, when the exhausted players are “rewarded” with a 20-minute game.

Every minute is action-packed — tackle, pass, sprint, repeat — and, with each converted try worth seven points, the lead often trades back and forth.

It’s a fast and unpredictable game.

That’s what Rugby Canada hopes the nation will fall in love with.

“It’s a fast, exciting game; seven people are covering the pitch and that requires a lot of hard work at a fast pace,” Canadian player Ghislaine Landry said.

The Toronto native is thrilled at the opportunity to play at home — she has 50 family members coming — and hopes the Pan Ams will help Canadians get excited about their sport before Rio.

With all the hand-wringing and hope around Canada’s women’s soccer team, it’s easy to see how much Canadians want a winning team, a team to get behind at the Summer Olympics the way they follow hockey at every Winter Games.

Canadians have that team in women’s rugby, they just don’t seem to know it yet.

The national women’s sevens team is ranked second in the world, just behind New Zealand and ahead of other traditional rugby powerhouses.

The Americans, ranked fifth, are their toughest competition at the Pan Ams, but the Brazilians, who have been building their team for a good showing at their home Olympics next year, will try to be the surprise spoilers of the expected Canada-U.S. gold-medal showdown.

“These girls have lots of swagger and it’s justified,” head coach, John Tait, said. “They’ve been performing quite well as a national group for quite some time now. But we’ve got to stay humble because it’s the type of game where if you don’t keep focus on the process and you start coming off what you need to do in the field as individuals, to bring a collective performance together, teams can come up and bite you.

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“Not literally, by the way,” Tait adds.

Such is the state of rugby sevens knowledge in Canada that the coach felt he needed to make that clear.

By the end of the weekend, the players hope to have changed this.