Feury, Fukofuka Praise RWC Prep, Buildup
Feury, Fukofuka Praise RWC Prep, Buildup
The USA Women's Eagles have a big year ahead of them.
They play three test matches at home and a total of at least nine test matches, potentially 11 and, crucially, five before they play in the 2025 World Cup.
April 26 USA vs Japan, UCLA
May 2 USA vs Canada, (Pacific 4) CPKC Stadium, Kansas City, MO
May 17 USA at Australian (Pacific 4) Canberra, Aus.
May 24 USA at New Zealand (Pacific 4) Auckland, NZ
July 19 USA vs Fiji Washington, DC
RWC
August 22 USA vs England Sunderland, Eng.
August 30 USA vs Australia York, Eng.
September 5, USA vs Samoa York, Eng.
Knockout rounds to come.
For players.and coaches the schedule offers two key things: challenging games that will provide important test match buildup for the Rugby World Cup in Australia in late summer; and secondly, those test matches are on US soil.
"Personally, I've been involved with USA Rugby for 10 years, and I've never played a game on the East Coast in a USA jersey, and being a New Jersey girl, I always wanted a game close to home," said Tess Feury. "So it's really exciting for me personally, and I think just for East Coast rugby in general, to have accessible USA women's and men's match in the same weekend. A lot of the very high profile university teams are on the East Coast. So I think we'll get a lot of support from those programs."
"This allows us to bring the game to the country and for the players to to be supported by their family, their friends, and people don't necessarily have that opportunity," said Fukofuka. "The doubleheader will be exciting because that's effectively our send-off ... before we head into to the World Cup, and the men head towards their their World Cup qualifiers, which for both of us is pretty important."
"I think it's huge that we're playing in different parts of the country," said Tess Feury, whose family is a rugby family in Morris County, NJ. "I have never played on the East Coast in a USA jersey so to be on the East Coast is
The earliest test matches do conflict with WER games, and in the end that's just something that has to be dealt with. Certainly a chunk of the roaster will be WER players, along with players from the PWR (or both).
Fukofuka will be testing out some players in those earlier test matches, expanding the roster out to about 40, and will be using the matches to bring that down to the World Cup squad. The Fiji match will essentially be the World Cup lineup.
"We're pretty comfortable with where the depth is built from last year," said the USA Coach. "We were able to obviously take a a group to Japan that were quite inexperienced to add to that player pool. I wouldn't say there's an area of need. There's probably an area where there's a couple of areas where we don't have a lot of depth."
Those would be flyhalf and the deep three.
"We're pretty happy with the quality that we have," but he's still looking for help.
Looking back to that trip to Japan, where there were some good moments and not-so-good moments, Feury said it was a crucial learning experience.
"The pressures of an international game really got to a lot of our players, both young and and even experienced," said Feury. "Really the last World Cup, we didn't have a lot of prep games. If you look at the number of test matches before the World Cup, it's much less than we have now, and I think the the pure game time that all of our players are getting now is going to help solve that issue of falling off the tracks a bit towards the end."
And the WER plays a role in that, PWR and WER experience is hugely important for the players, said Feury.
"This year kind of worked out perfectly for our National Team players, with the timeline of it, and really credit to both leagues that it's all going to best prepare us for the World Cup," said Feury, adding that success at the World Cup will help the women's professional game overall. "I think this year is a perfect setup. Obviously, there's going to be some some hiccups scheduling-wise going forward. I think the WER is so so exciting, and with the opening game this weekend, I think I think everyone's going to be really surprised at the level of play. I've been at training in the last few weeks and I've been just so impressed with the talent and the work rate of of the team."
Coming off a somewhat disappointing World Cup in 2021, the Eagles will have a tough draw. But Fukofuka said that while the buildup of professional and international games is important to the Eagles, he still has a job to do—put it all into a team.
"Performance under pressure isn't an accident. It takes time to develop combinations, trust, and confidence. This year, in our planning we were very cognizant of the need to spend time together. We have Japan and three test matches in the Pac 4. We'll have six weeks of uninterrupted connected time before we come back in. Our World Cup preparation is five weeks into the World Cup. So a key element or principle of what we want to develop within our program is the ability to spend time together to get those combinations to build the the game model that we want to perform in, and then having opportunities, as Tess said, to play, perform under pressure, and in international games."
