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Emilie Bydwell: 'We were an anomaly...now they can genuinely see this as a career path'
By Joe Harvey
To celebrate International Women’s Day, RugbyPass are sharing a series of exclusive interviews with the six female head coaches on the HSBC SVNS Series, the second with trailblazing USA coach Emilie Bydwell.
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Women currently make up 25% of head coaching roles across all 24 teams involved in the Series, with even fewer leading 15s teams, and all of their unique stories must be honoured.
Even before Bydwell led the USA to an Olympic bronze medal in Paris, she had made history.
The first woman to lead a side at the tournament, the 39-year-old doubled down to stun Australia in the bronze medal match and firmly put American rugby on the map.
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It was a campaign that saw Ilona Maher emerge as rugby’s biggest star and ended with a $4,000,000 investment from women’s sports philanthropist Michele Kang that hopes to take the team to gold at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
Since taking charge of the Eagles in 2021, Bydwell has established herself as a pioneer in rugby sevens and a true tour de force on the training field.
But for the majority of her time leading the USA, Bydwell had been on her own island.
In 2023 she was the only woman holding a head coach role on the Series.
Ahead of the new HSBC SVNS Series getting underway at the end of 2024 in Dubai, Bydwell is now one of six female head coaches following the appointments of Jocelyn Barrieau (Canada), Crystal Kaua (Brazil), Giselle Mather (Great Britain), Yuka Kanematsu (Japan) and Maria Ribera (Spain), as other nations look to encourage the same success as the USA.
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“It is just so special to have had such an influx of female leaders in the game,” she said.
“It’s not just special for us but for the players. They may not know how much it means to them, but the fact that they can genuinely see this as a career path for them moving forward and to feel like they have people that understand them and what they’ve been through is important.
“It was a monumental moment to kick off with 50 per cent of the World Series coaches being women.”
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With this influx of female coaches, the 39-year-old has reached out to her counterparts with the aim of creating a shared bond between the group.
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Having experienced all the trials and tribulations of being alone at the very top.
“I’ve tried to create a bit of a community with those coaches,” Bydwell said. “Just reaching out before the tournament.
“The World Series is competitive, we all want to win with our teams, but it’s also a pretty lonely place to be a head coach of a World Series team.
“At the end of the day you’re the only one that understands what it is like to be fully accountable.
“We can be competitive and still try to create that community, because I think if you don’t find people like that, it can be pretty hard.
“Also, just knowing how lonely it can be and trying to make it a little less lonely for a minute.”
Bydwell’s stock rose even further when an excerpt of an interview she did in November was released by Premier Rugby Sevens.
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Speaking at the tournament’s All-Star Tournament in November before the new SVNS Series campaign got underway in Dubai, the 39-year-old spoke alongside her Canadian counterpart, Jocelyn Barrieau.
In the interview, the 39-year-old spoke about how the two coaches see the use of empathy as a strength and not to the detriment of a coach in a high performance environment.
That powerful statement from the American garnered thousands of views in the days after its release and was discussed on The Good, The Scaz & The Rugby by new GB Rugby Sevens boss Giselle Mather.
So far as Bydwell is concerned her comments are simply continuity.
Living and breathing that mantra of ‘love, connection and empathy’ on a daily basis beneath the southern California sun and on rugby pitches the world over, she was almost surprised when seeing that those seconds of video that provided just a snapshot of the ‘Bydwell experience’ caught the imagination of so many the world over.
“It is weird, because I feel like I talk about that all the time,” Bydwell smiled. “I don’t think I really realised that it had that much traction.
“What was important to me about it is, I really wanted to say it to Jocelyn, because she was the one I was talking to.
“The reality is that I’ve struggled with this for the last three or four years. I’ll struggle with it for the next 10 years.
“It is the competitors and the players that we have, thinking that empathy and care, or the ability to show empathy and lead with empathy, is a weakness.
“I just try to use every opportunity that I can to highlight that it is actually a super strength.
“You can only truly create a high performance environment if that is also coupled with this idea of safety, love and care.
“I think trying to break down that barrier of trying to cultivate love in the environment, you’re trying to cultivate this really strong connection that transcends being on the field.
“I’m glad I did it (the interview) because I think that it was a good snapshot of my general philosophy and what I think high performance should be about.”
Bydwell recalled that one of the most challenging things in her young coaching career was proving to players that she was the correct person to be leading them.
First flirting with coaching at her alma mater Brown University before moving to the West Coast to be part of USA Rugby’s first intake of centrally contracted players.
Former USA women’s sevens coach Ric Suggitt even joked that Bydwell was going to take his job one day, with the Canadian’s grand plan for the Eagles’ even forming the foundation of the bronze medal winning side last summer.
After calling time on her playing career, Bydwell took up a full-time coaching role with Atavus Rugby prior to her appointment as USA Rugby Director of Women’s High Performance in 2018 and also coached Women’s Premier League club San Diego Surfers ahead of succeeding Chris Brown nearly four years ago.
Whether it was battling against unconscious bias or lack of normality in seeing a woman holding a whistle on the training pitch, it was then that the former USA international knew how hard she had to work to prove herself.
At the 2010 Rugby World Cup in England, Bydwell and her Eagles teammates were led by an all-female coaching panel.
Seeing Kathy Flores, Candi Orsini, Alex Williams and Krista McFarren take the USA to a fifth-place finish removed any uncertainty that coaching was in Bydwell’s future.
“For the 2010 World Cup, we were an anomaly then, but it is wild that it took a long time to re-circle back to having more female coaches,” Bydwell said.
“I think what has happened through professionalisation of women’s rugby, and this happens a lot, unfortunately, men are getting the jobs.
“They have more professional experience. They are viewed as better, more qualified coaches and women get overlooked.
“It has been professional for long enough that women have built up the experience to be getting national team roles.
“I think people are also recognising how much value in having women coach women in high performance teams.”
Now it is almost 13 years since rugby sevens’ introduction to the Olympic Games meant that nations and since the first World Rugby Women’s Sevens Series.
It was at that time nations began to seriously fund their rugby sevens teams with the help of their Olympic Associations and took the development of women’s high performance rugby to the next level.
As more players hardened on the world stage begin to consider what they will do after their playing careers are done, Bydwell hopes that this dramatic upswing in female coaches in SVNS can inspire more to take up coaching.
“My hope would be that the women that are in these roles are getting supported the way they should be,” Bydwell said.
“It’s getting so much more competitive in the women’s Series now. There’s going to be good tournaments and there’s going to be bad tournaments. It’s just the way it goes.
“Actually investing in the women and supporting them in their development and making sure that they’re getting what they need from a resource and development standpoint so that they can actually be in the roles for more than just a year or two seasons.
“What I don’t want is for this to be just an experiment the year after Paris, like ‘put in a female coach, she had an okay year, so we make a change’.
“There have been so many fantastic players that have been in the professional era, I would love to see more of those players transitioning into support coach roles.
“I don’t want to be perceived as saying there aren’t really great men in the game either.
“I’ve had some really special friends over the Paris campaign, I felt had my back and sounding boards for me. I don’t want to minimise those people’s impact on the game.
“But just because there are fantastic guys in the game doesn’t mean it’s any less important to have women in these roles.
“I think it’s just figuring out what the balance is, but I do think having women coaching these teams is really important.”
The Women's Rugby World Cup 2025 is coming to England. Click here to buy tickets.
