Women at centre of key roles in Munster Senior Cup rugby final

THE Bank of Ireland Munster Senior Challenge Cup final is just one week away and excitement is building for the match which will see Young Munster take on Nenagh Ormond in Thomond Park on Thursday, March 16, 7.30pm.

For Young Munster, they are aiming for a special three-in-a-row run of titles while for Nenagh, it is their first time reaching the final and they have already become the first Tipperary team to reach this stage of the competition.

The final will have a unique element with the two clubs contesting the final having female presidents. For Young Munster, Trish Montgomery is the first female president of the club while for Nenagh, Theresa Hassey's tenure is the second time the Tipperary club have had a female president.

For International Women's Day, Munster Rugby sat down to speak with Trish and Theresa about their lives in rugby.

“I never made a big deal about being involved in rugby as a woman because it’s something that has never occurred to me,” Trish says.

“When I was asked to go for the junior vice-president to begin with, I hummed and hawed for a while and said yeah. What I loved about it was meeting teams at the pre matches, meeting the other officials from the other clubs. Down through the years, I know people from every club that we play and it’s really nice to reconnect with them because at the end of the day we’re all the same.”

Trish continues: “At the moment we have in our underage committee, our chairperson of that is a woman as well, Collette Bolger. The secretary of that is a woman and we have two other women on our senior committee and a couple of years ago we had councillor Olivia O’Sullivan. She was our first PRO. So we have a tradition. We’ve always had. Usually it was the parents who got involved.”

“It’s very similar,” Theresa begins. “It was never a focus that we have a woman president or we have a lady president. That never came into it, it was just ‘you’re the right person for it and we want you to do it.’ I was looking at our centenary book, we were founded in 1884.

"Our centenary book was actually the year I met my husband and started to understand about rugby. We had brought out a centenary book that year 1984 and there was a lady on the committee that year. We had a lady president 10 years ago. We have a female coach who coaches U18s and U16s. We have lots of female people involved.

“Our secretary is female. That doesn’t ever come into it it’s just that person is doing that. I know there’s a focus now on 40% of female representation and stuff like that. I think it happens organically, it probably works a bit better.”

For Trish and Theresa, they have had different journeys which have brought them to the sport. Trish explains that a love of rugby was instilled at a young age:

“Yeah, since I was about four. One of my older brothers played, he went to Crescent and he played with the school and I used to insist on being brought until he begged my father not to bring me anymore because I used to run up and down the sideline shouting at him to run faster or catch the ball or whatever!"

When Trish met her husband, Eddie, she then became involved with Young Munster and she has never looked back.

“The minute I stepped in the door, I loved the place because the people are so down to earth, they’re so honest and never made a big deal of, ‘We’re male, only males play rugby’ sort of thing. I never got that feeling there at all."

For Theresa, she first became involved in rugby when she met her husband and when her children started playing rugby for Nenagh.

“I was asked to join the committee I think as a PRO first, secretary for a number of years and eventually I was asked by Keith Hayes who was our president last year, who we very tragically lost, a young man. He died at the end of the season just after we were safe and came through the play-offs.

“He asked me to do it and I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll think about it’. There was a lot of presidents before him and they all did a great job but he had made it into something that I figured it was right for me.

“I’ve been doing what other presidents didn’t do before but then there’s other presidents who have done things that I won’t do, so everybody puts their own kind of stamp on things.”

That stamp for Theresa includes reaching out to small businesses in the Nenagh community to see how they and the club can work together for mutual benefit and also slightly changing the traditional activities such as tie presentations.

“I suppose I’ve gotten away from the traditional tie. We’ve been giving a scarf at our home games instead of the traditional tie and bottle of wine. It’s only a small thing but it’s something that stands out as being different I think."

Modesty comes to the fore when it is suggested that Trish and Theresa are role models in their current positions but they do hope in the future that there doesn’t need to be a conversation around women’s participation in sport on and off the field, that it would just be considered normal.

“As of recently,” Theresa begins. “I have a little grandchild, a little girl and I would love to think that she would say, ‘That’s something that I could do as well.’ Anybody who has young children that they don’t see it as anything as an issue, that you don’t even have to think about it, that it’s just the norm.”