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Jocelyn Barrieau: ‘The goal is that they become household names’
Jocelyn Barrieau will venture onto the HSBC SVNS Series as a head coach for the first time this weekend in Dubai.
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In May it was announced that experienced coach Barrieau would take charge of Canada’s women’s sevens team after at Paris 2024. Six months on, she’ll lead the Olympic silver medallists in Dubai.
Starting her coaching journey the year after she finished playing rugby at high school, Barrieau coached at CEGEPs level before going on to Dawson College and Concordia University, where she held the head coach position from 2018. She additionally started the sevens programme in her native Quebec, which culminated with Quebec’s women’s U18 team winning silver at the 2022 Canada Games in Niagara.
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At the Olympics, there was only one female sevens head coach – the USA’s Emilie Bydwell. With Barrieau’s graduation from the assistant coach position, and subsequent head coach appointments from Great Britain (Giselle Mather), Brazil (Crystal Kaua), Japan (Yuka Kanematsu), and Spain (Maria Ribera) that number on the HSBC SVNS Series has rapidly swelled to six. This means that 50% of the women’s teams will be coached by female head coaches this season.
While in her position on the coaching team of the Candian XVs team during WXV earlier this year, Barrieau spoke to RugbyPass about her coaching journey, what’s next for the team, and the importance of the ‘One Squad’ framework.
Canada’s Olympic silver medal in Paris has further sparked the legacy made by their inaugural bronze in 2016.
“I don’t know if I fully understand how much it has [impacted]. All I do to reference it on a personal level is just thinking about what that 2016 group was able to accomplish and kind of how they became known across the country.
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“That was such a special group and the legacy kind of now gets to live on with a different group so the goal is that they become familiar and that they’re household names, and by the time 2032 rolls around we’ll be celebrating them with their own Barbie release and have them be talked about around kitchen tables around Canada,” she said.
Many of those athletes from Paris featured in Canada’s home WXV competition, where they won two out of three matches, only falling to world number one side England after a close tussle at Vancouver’s BC Place. The likes of Olivia Apps and Fancy Bermudez are prime examples of the movement, and success, shared between the two squads this year.
The duo played XVs in April and May at the Pacific Four Series where they beat New Zealand for the first time to take the title, moved back to sevens in the build-up to and for the Olympics where they won silver, and returned to XVs for WXV.
It is likely that this crossover, a key pillar of Canada’s ‘One Squad’ mentality which was promoted on the big screens in pre-match videos during WXV, will also form an integral part of their preparations for Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025.
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“First of all, we have amazing athletes,” the Québécois coach begins. “We’re fortunate to have so many wonderful athletes coming through this country and rugby players. It’s really key that the staff communicate quite a bit, I would say almost daily, and they also have to get along and have similar philosophies. That’s something that is really important.
“If you come in and you have two different philosophies, I can’t see it working, but in my experience, it’s all I’ve known to be successful is to share resources, share people, share energy, and share our love of the game together. That’s all I’ve ever known to be successful.”
While not yet at the heights of the likes of ice hockey and soccer in terms of large-scale popularity and awareness, rugby enthusiasts in Canada continue to chip away at building the sport’s profile.
WXV 1 earlier this year marked the first time women’s international XVs had been played at Vancouver’s BC Place, a popular destination on the HSBC SVNS Series which will mark 10 years of hosting the competition in 2025.
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We speak in the business centre at the team’s hotel in Vancouver, and a hotel guest overhears our conversation, namely when I ask Barrieau about rugby being a less popular sport in Canada.
The guest, with it perhaps unbeknownst to her that she was staying in the same hotel as the best women’s rugby players in her country, joined our conversation to discuss her own rugby experiences. She cites how she played rugby in Toronto, and how her high school boyfriend started a league in Anguilla, in a heartwarming interlude to our interview.
When we start up our conversation again, Barrieau shines a light on a key pillar of their talent-spotting process and describes the benefits of their provincial network in supporting this.
“We have a partnership with RBC which is the Royal Bank of Canada, and one of the ways we identify players is through RBC training ground,” she explained. “We’re in a partnership with them where they go around the country and have athletes just say ‘Hey, we have a dream, we’ll try and help you do it.’ That’s one way that we identify talent and that’s on the grander scale, anybody can sign up for that and anybody can attend that.
“And then we have quite a good scouting network, we’re quite well-connected. Because we only have 10 provinces, it’s a strength. We can really find people quite easily. That part is really great and again, the legacy of the 2016 team medalling in Rio paved the way for the Canada Games competition in 2022, we never had that before. For the women to have been there in 2022 and now going back in 2025, it’s a game-changing event.”
The Canada Games features 17 sports and runs on a two-year basis in between the Summer and Winter Olympic Games for up-and-coming athletes. The last edition of the Summer Canada Games took place in 2022, delayed from 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and was the first time rugby sevens had featured.
Game-changing proves to be an accurate evaluation of the impact of the Canada Games, as Barrieau goes on to describe the remarkable journey of one of their team’s youngest Olympic silver medallists.
“A kid, Carissa Norsten, from Saskatchewan, which is a very small province in Canada rugby-wise and population-wise, went from the Canada Games to the Olympic Games in the span of two years. That’s a crazy thing if you think about it. It makes our network so connected, and that’s one way, really strong connections throughout the provinces is huge and universities as well.”
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With an Olympic medal to their name in 2024, what would success look like for this team going forward? Their new head coach lays out her aspirations for the season ahead and beyond.
“We’re definitely looking to pinnacle events like the Grand Final and Vancouver Sevens, of course, to make our country the most proud of us and to continue to be in the conversation around dinner tables,” she stressed.
“Success also looks like investing in our next-generation pool of athletes and getting them experience on the World Series and saying hey, let’s see where we are. We have a group that’s all very much eligible to go to LA [2028], every single player is in the age bracket and if they choose to want to continue to invest, they’re all potential candidates for LA which is a really cool place to be in at this point.
“We also know that some people might move on and other things might happen so we just want to continue to ensure that the depth in our youth and our NextGen is really strong. Giving them opportunities and representing who we are as a country on the world stage and continuing to grow and develop our leadership.
“We want to win a World Series, we haven’t won a World Series title since 2019 so that’s a big one for us to try to get back in that realm of making winning less shocking, and for people to stop being so shocked every time that Canada does well because it keeps happening to us, for some reason,” she added with a laugh.
Barrieau’s Canada team will face Paris 2024 gold medallists New Zealand, alongside Japan and Brazil in Pool C at the HSBC SVNS in Dubai this weekend. You can watch the action from both pitches live and for free on RugbyPass TV. Click here for more.
