GHPA driving growth of women’s coaching at the Women's Rugby World Cup

The most important room in women’s rugby isn’t the changing room or the media suite. It’s the meeting room where an aspiring coach is asked for a view on tomorrow’s session, then has to wear the consequences on the pitch an hour later. That’s the point of the Gallagher High Performance Academy (GHPA): open the door, put people to work, and let the sport see what they can do.

Carol Isherwood, who leads the GHPA, is blunt about why it matters. The bottleneck isn’t enthusiasm or qualifications; it’s access to elite environments. Too many women do the badges, then stall because they haven’t been given the right level of hands-on experience.

“What it is really is a coaching internship programme. We ran one at the World Cup and then Gallagher decided to take it on further and help us support this at WXV and at two Sevens programmes as well.” Isherwood said, “We run a range of online workshops as well as face-to-face workshops when they’re at the event. But the real special thing is being an intern with the squad.”

‘This Energy Never Stops’ – Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025

‘This Energy Never Stops’ – Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025

The GHPA removes that friction by embedding interns with squads for one to four weeks, sometimes longer in WXV windows, so they live the tempo of a campaign, not a classroom version of it. They sit in planning, pitch sessions and reviews.

At the forefront of the GHPA is former England international Sarah Hunter CBE, who has transitioned from being one of the sport’s elite players to the coaching ranks.

Operating as the defence coach in John Mitchell’s staff, Hunter was a member of the first intake for the GHPA and credits the program as a key catalyst for her rise up the ranks.

“If you’re an aspiring coach who wants to coach in a high-performance environment, then this programme is exactly the programme to support you,” Hunter said. “It just gives you that opportunity to be embedded into the day-to-day experience of being in that high-performance competition arena and gives you the support network and mentorship to guide you on the next steps of your coaching career.”

Delving into discussions she has had with former teammates and rivals who are looking to make the jump to the coaching ranks, Hunter was clear in her advice.

“Since I’ve come back as a coach, a lot of the players have genuinely been interested in how that transition is. I’ve spoken really honestly about how I’ve really benefited from the programme and how I think it’s really helped me.”

Alongside that, online and face-to-face workshops require coaches to examine their values, culture, and communication. It is all aimed at making people effective inside high-performance environments, not just accredited for them.  A point Isherwood was keen to stress as one of the hallmarks of what the academy has already and strives to facilitate.

“One of the big difficulties often for women trying to get that next level and get up to that elite high-performance level is the lack of high-performance experience. So, the chance to be with the squad for a week or two weeks, or sometimes, in the case of WXV, three or four weeks, is invaluable.”

The model is format-agnostic, and the SVNS tour has become a live case study. World Rugby’s Sally Horrox pointed to a simple outcome, “We’re here in Rugby World Cup 25, but this programme is across sevens and fifteen. To make it clear, 50% of the coaches on that circuit are female which is fantastic.”

That number doesn’t move because attitudes shift in the abstract; it moves when the right people get real reps. The Academy is only three seasons old in its current format, 2023 through 2025, but the scoreboard already reads like a structural change rather than a splashy initiative.

43 coaches have come through the pathway, and a healthy chunk are now working at this World Cup. Across World Rugby environments, the percentage of women coaching has doubled since 2022. Those are appointments, not attendance certificates.

Part of the story is the sponsor behaving like a partner. Horrox described Gallagher’s value in two words: alignment and practicality.

“It’s this long-term alignment of values; they have a really strong set of values around equity, fairness and integrity.” Said Sally Horrox, Chief of Women’s Rugby at World Rugby.

The Gallagher family are rugby people with a long footprint in the sport. “They are rugby nuts,” Horrox said of the family who not only sponsor the GHPA but are also the title sponsors of men’s Gallagher Premiership and, of course, the Rugby World Cup.

Away from the rugby pitch, Gallagher’s leaders haven’t just written cheques; they have stepped into the room. Female executives have taken part in workshops online and in person, bringing the kind of lived perspective that turns a session from content into a challenge.

As Horrox surmised, when a partner asks, “What problem are we solving together?” and then helps solve it, the right package stops being the point. The work is the point.

If you want the pathway translated into human terms, follow the jobs. Wales’ Catrina Nicholas-McLaughlin rose from WXV internships to U18s, U20s, Celtic Challenge and now the World Cup. Claire Cruikshank went from internships to Edinburgh’s Head of Women’s Performance. Crystal Kaua (NZ) leads Brazil Sevens, Yuka Kanematsu heads Japan Sevens, and Brazil’s Nivea Ferreira now coaches nationally.

The pattern is clear: like players, coaches do not always finish where they start. A Fifteen’s internship can evolve into a SVNS’ appointment and vice versa. The constant is exposure. Once decision-makers have seen someone operate, the market corrects.

After six years of work, the programme is undergoing a review, with research from Leeds Beckett University due to inform the plan through 2029. Expect three tracks to anchor it.

First, a deeper partnership with unions and regions, because identification and deployment live locally. The Academy can equip and advocate, but unions control most of the real seats. The focus isn’t just on training; it is on placement at the right level, so growth doesn’t stall between modules.

Second, player transition. For the first time, the women’s game has a sizeable cohort of recently retired or soon-to-retire internationals who want to coach. The front door is busy. The GHPA intends to catch that wave with internships, mentoring and visible jobs so the interest translates into careers.

Third, a wider lens on performance roles. Team managers have long been skewed female, but the sport needs more women across the board.

Areas such as Strength and Conditioning (S&C), analysis, refereeing, and team operations, because what the analyst clips and the S&C prescribes shapes the product as much as the coach’s game plan.

Reflecting on the Coaching Intern Programme camp in Stellenbosch in South Africa’s Western Cape, Isherwood highlighted the expanding focus that the program has already begun to explore. “We’ve focused on coaches because it was the immediate one, but at the Stellenbosch camp I talked about, we had female S&C, referees and coaches.”

None of this works in workshops alone. The hard truth, voiced in the roundtable, is that the impact lives or dies when coaches go home. Cultures in unions and clubs either compound the experience or smother it.

“The biggest challenge is working in that partnership (with unions), so we’re getting the right people through at the right time,” Isherwood said.

There is also a broader flywheel at play. The fastest-growing part of rugby is girls and women. Growth sticks when participants can see women leading teams at the community level and in elite environments, setting standards on the grass and selecting squads in the box.

Highlighting this point has been the record-setting attendance of the Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025. Events of this magnitude remain crucial as the showpiece and if you will a key juncture in a never-ending loop of development. Inspiring the next generation to dream of following in the footsteps of their idols on the pitch and in the coach’s box.

The GHPA sits in the middle of this loop. It provides qualified coaches with an opportunity to prove themselves, and teams with a reason to hire them. The result is not just representation for its own sake. It is a deeper bench of people capable of winning Test matches and building programmes.

Three years in, the GHPA feels like infrastructure the sport didn’t know it was missing. The targets will stretch again after the review; they should. The thesis is settled. Put more women in real roles, for real time, with real responsibility, and the rest tends to take care of itself.