Rugby included in Olympics

In 2009, it was announced that rugby sevens would be included in the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Although I loved being on the sevens team, my true love was the 15-man game. Just like most kids in Canada at that time, if you played rugby in high school or for a club, you were likely playing the 15-man game.

That Olympic announcement changed the direction of my career, and I know a lot of my sevens teammates would agree.

Just a few months later in 2010, the Winter Olympics came to Vancouver. I remember greasing my way into the Heineken House at the Minoru Oval in Richmond, B.C., with my buddies to watch the various events. I even remember where I was when Sidney Crosby scored the gold-medal winning goal (shout out to The Roxy).

After that experience, the decision was made. I wanted to go to the Olympics as an athlete, playing sevens. But we had a long way to go.

First order of business was to make Canada a “core team” on the international sevens circuit. Since we weren’t at that level during the 2010-11 season, our tournament exposure was limited to only five of the eight HSBC Sevens World Series events.

We all knew how important it was to regain that status, especially now that rugby was back in the Olympics. The experience you get playing top-level rugby is really what allows you to improve as a player and team. That’s something that’s lacking in Canadian rugby. Still, we would get a boost in funding for the program as a whole.

Our opportunity to re-qualify for core status came in 2012. Looking back on that tournament in Hong Kong, it was probably some of the worst rugby we’ve played as a team since I’ve been involved.

Nevertheless, we managed to grind it out and qualify. Grinding out wins was something that we got pretty good at for a while there. It wasn’t always pretty but we somehow managed to stay in games with teams that were probably better than us on paper.