Straight Up by Ruby Tui

Author:Ruby Tui [Ruby Tui]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2022-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

RUBY’S TRAINING BAG

I love my body. I trained to be the best rugby player I could, and this is what it looks like.

2013

19. Seeing red

In January 2013, the New Zealand National Rugby Sevens women’s tournament was reinstituted, after a break of ten years (even though the men’s tournament had been going all that time). It’s a tournament for all the provincial teams, and I was playing for Canterbury, with Ernie as our coach. There was a lot of excitement, with all the 60 girls from those selection camps on fire, representing their regions. Frickin’ cool, and I was loving every minute as we settled in to our hotel.

I was looking pretty sharp, pretty eye-catching because I’d done something I always wanted to do and dyed my hair red. I would love to have dyed it all red, but I couldn’t afford that so I got this bright red streak in the side of my hair, which I loved, and when I tied my hair up I was unmissable.

Maybe it worked too well, because the night before we played Ernie called me into his room and he said, I’m going to name you team captain tomorrow.

I wanted to sink to the floor. I had just turned 21, the youngest and the smallest in our team. All these other girls in the Canterbury team had been playing for New Zealand for years. All I had done was made that one tournament. I hadn’t even been selected for the Dubai tournament the month before. How could they possibly respect me enough to let me lead them? Are you kidding me, bro? And then I thought: Oh my God. Mids! How could I ever expect to lead her? I was sure they’d all roll their eyes, even laugh, maybe. My mind would always go to the negative perspectives of things.

But he wasn’t asking me. He was telling me.

I didn’t sleep that night, and then the next day he told everyone, and I just kept thinking that the ones from Sydenham were thinking he only did that because he was my coach in the varsity team and I couldn’t help but agree.

But then we started playing and I began to relax a bit, because the one thing I could do was play sevens. I’d got really fit and strong, I was quick, and I’d always been keen. I felt I was earning the girls’ respect because I was everywhere, playing every minute, and I was doing a real good job.

It hit me — the thing that Ernie probably wanted me to learn — that a captain doesn’t have to be top-down, because there was no way I could be top-down with these women. A captain doesn’t even have to be the best in the team; the captain can just be really good at whatever it is they’re good at, and I was really good at just putting my head down and going to work — picking players up, encouraging them, pushing them to go harder, leading by example.

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