Rugby Sevens

How it started

Ned HaigLocal butcher in Melrose, Scotland, credited with inventing rugby sevens as a fundraiser for his cash-strapped rugby club., a local butcher in Melrose, Scotland, invented rugby sevens in 1883 to raise money for his cash-strapped rugby club. Fifteen players a side made for a long, expensive afternoon, so he cut the teams to seven and the halves to seven minutes, fast, small-sided rugby built to squeeze several matches into one day of fundraising.1

When women joined the scrum

Women were trying to play a version of the game as early as 1881, when two teams staged exhibition matches in Scotland and northern England. Several of those games had to be stopped early when crowds rioted at the grounds.2

The opposition wasn’t just crowds. Sporting bodies actively tried to ban or discourage women from playing, and most national rugby unionsThe governing body for rugby in a given country, not to be confused with “Rugby Union,” the 15-a-side format of the sport. Unions organize official teams and sanction competitions. refused to organize or officially recognize women’s teams for decades, leaving the women’s game to run entirely outside their control. SamoaPacific island nation with a strong rugby tradition; its national team, Manu Samoa, remains internationally competitive despite the country’s small population.’s rugby union banned women from the sport outright, a ban that held into the 1960s.3

The game found its real foothold in university clubs instead, starting with Edinburgh University in 1962. Two decades later, in 1982, France met the Netherlands in the first official women’s international. Sevens specifically, the format Haig invented, didn’t reach international competition for women until 1997, at the Hong Kong SevensOne of rugby’s most prestigious annual tournaments, held since 1976. Adding a women’s tournament in 1997 was a major legitimizing moment for the women’s game..4

The women’s game caught up fast once it was formalized. A Women’s Sevens World Cup followed in 2009, and when rugby sevens finally made its Olympic debut at the 2016 Rio Games, men’s and women’s tournaments were included together, with equal numbers of players and teams on each side from the very first Games.