VANCOUVER—Jen Kish’s pre-game ritual is always the same.

She puts on her national team jersey, visualizes what her first touch on the ball will be in the opening seconds of the game and then reaches down to check that the tape on her left knee is nice and tight.

When she leads the Canadians onto the rugby field, as she did here Thursday for their match against France, her knee is always wrapped in white medical tape. It runs in thick bands above and below her knee with more strips crisscrossing from thigh to calf.

It’s not that her knee is injured, because it’s not. But it was last year, and she’s determined to make sure it never happens again.

“It’s probably something I’ll do for the rest of my career,” Kish, captain of Canada’s women’s rugby sevens team, said.

“If John had his way, we’d all be taped head to toe.”

That’s a bit of an inside joke between her and Canadian head coach John Tait, but it hints at the very real challenge in the high-speed, contact sport of rugby sevens, which is about to make its Olympic debut in Rio.

This game, at the elite international level, is relatively new and the only way for the Canadian women to hone their skills for Rio is to simply play more. But each game and practice session comes with the risk of sustaining an injury that could sideline them for months. And since Canada doesn’t have a deep bench, if the team is to have a shot at the Olympic medal they so desperately want this summer, the top players all need to arrive there in one piece.

“That’s the hardest thing in coaching contact sports,” Tait said. “Balancing the need for contact to train, and the exposure to the risk of injury.

“I think we’ve got a pretty good recipe of how much contact you need to get physically ready and how you can control that contact. In training, we’ll do a lot of close-quarter tackling where there isn’t this massive run up to the collusion. So if someone gets it wrong they’re not running at 30-km an hour, it’s two-km an hour.”

This season hasn’t been particularly kind to the Canadians. They played the World Series opener with just half their regular roster because the rest were injured. Some of those players are back, but others have since taken their place on the injured list.

The team tracks injuries looking for anything that could help reduce them but, maddeningly, there seems to be little rhyme or reason to many of them.

One year, it’s all broken hands; another year, it’s all knees. Karen Paquin was injured in the semi-final of the World Series tournament in Brazil, but Magali Harvey’s injury happened during a training session at home in Victoria, B.C.

Now, both are missing the Vancouver Rugby Festival’s three-day invitational tournament, where Canada has fielded two women’s teams to maximize playing opportunities.

In the first match of the tournament, Kish’s Maple Leaf Red team beat France 24-10 on Thursday. In their second game against the USA Falcons, which they won 31-12, Kish was carried off the pitch. Team officials said it was minor and she is expected to be back playing Friday.

For her part, Paquin expects to be back with the team before long and she’ll play just as she did before — hard and fast.

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“You can’t be careful. You can’t play with that little voice ‘what if you get injured?’ you just can’t do that. If you do that, that’s when you get injured for sure,” said the 28-year-old from Quebec City.

“You have to be able to tackle when Rio comes. Injuries are part of the game and it might happen the week before, that’s the risk you have to take if you want to make it.”

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