This is because Sport England actually ask a cross-section of the population what sports they have played within the last six months, whereas RFUW rely on data that is an off-shoot of the Rugby First database, the club player registration system. Trouble is there is no incentive for clubs to - for example - remove players from the system if they stop playing, add them if they start playing (unless they are actually playing in a tournament), or register at all if they are girls or women (because girls and and women are almost never asked for any registration cards for any tournaments at any level). In addition - as the register automatically defaults to "male" for every new entry - it is amazing how many male rugby players called "Sophie" and "Amanda" there are (or were when I last looked).
The good news is that - at last! - RFUW are trying to do something about this, as they have circulated all clubs with an appeal to put their registrations in order. Its a tough ask - despite the fairly heavy tone of the missive sent out from Twickenham, while there remains no practical incentive to register players the RFUW totals will remain an undercount.
However, it is not a problem unique to England by any means as a glance at the latest player number statistics from the rest of the Six Nations shows. Some seem about right, but some are just...
Well, put it this way. Below are the Six Nations, the six totals given for their number of women players by each of the nations. But the totals and the teams have been mixed up.
Which official total applies to which nation. Can you guess?
| Nation | Official number of women players |
| a) England | i) 9957 |
| b) France | ii) 2764 |
| c) Ireland | iii) 850 |
| d) Italy | iv) 7310 |
| e) Scotland | v)13893 |
| f) Wales | vi) 2874 |
You can do a search on names on Rugby First???
ReplyDeleteKind of - when you enter a new name it "checks" to see if similar names have already been registered. It was not unusual (say 10% of the time? roughly) to find that - when the female names I was putting in came up with close matches - the girls/women matched were actually down as "male".
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