Is Australia's merging of sevens and XVs already bearing fruit?

Win, lose or draw come the end of the Super Rugby Champions Final on Saturday evening, the 2026 Super Rugby Women’s domestic season has marked a line in the sand for Australian women’s rugby.

The NSW Waratahs will bring the curtain down on what has been a busy three months on Saturday 1 August, facing the Blues at Leichhardt Oval just over three weeks out from the Wallaroos’ 100th Test match against the Black Ferns in Auckland.

However, the fact the seven-time champions had to make this fixture the hard way, bouncing back from first ever losses to the Western Force and Queensland Reds, is not just why this season was significant.

It was also notable of the increased competitiveness across the entire competition, with five of the 13 fixtures decided by a margin of seven or less, and only two games seeing a winning margin greater than 20 points. By comparison 2024 saw seven blowouts.

What made this season significant was that, across all squads in Fiji and Australia, 2026 marked a moment where, more than any previous seasons, a new generation of players made their mark.

Across every team, a universal message, whether if it was from Wallaroos Player of the Year Tabua Tuinakauvadra, Drua head coach Mike Legge or established Aussie Sevens star Alysia Lefau-Fakaosilea, was how significant the merging of sevens and XVs was to creating competition for positions.

“I think you don’t really notice how many babies there are until we all sit down in a room and you’re like, wow,” Tuinakauvadra said ahead of the Brumbies’ clash against Fiji in June.

“The depth that they’ve developed in the off-season, lots of those girls have played NextGen 7s. It’s really exciting for what this programme looks like in the next five to 10 years.

“It’s just like a good burst of energy. Sometimes you need the youth to keep you up.”

“The blending of both the old and the new, it’s reinvigorated a lot of our players,” Legge said of the 14 debutants who joined the Drua this year.

“It’s brought a new atmosphere into this Drua space… The new girls are actually challenging and pushing our more experienced players as well.”

“There’s a few girls making the transition into XVs,” Lefau-Fakaosilea said upon her return to the Reds.

“The feedback we’ve got back is that they love the environment and bringing the stuff they learned from XVs, and to sevens.

“We’re learning from each other and you can see how it affects both XVs and sevens.”

A productive learning environment in Super Rugby Women’s would be music to the ears of Rugby Australia’s new Director of Women’s High Performance, Tim Walsh, who has made it no secret he wants to pave a two-way street.

“You saw other countries with New Zealand, you saw Risi [Pouri-Lane] and Jorja Miller debut the World Cup and they were the best players,” Walsh said in an interview with
rugby.com.au earlier this month.

“You talk about sevens to XVs, I think there’s a lot of XVs to sevens as well. It’s about learning from each other, utilising what each game has to offer, and then aligning career planning for individuals is really important and will also be a competitive advantage.”

Walsh’s hopes of sevens players hitting the ground running has already yielded results, with NextGen 7s star Amelia Whitaker being recognised as the Waratahs Women’s Player of the Year and Spanish dual international Anne Fernández de Corres claiming the Helen Taylor Award for Women’s Player of the Year at the Brumbies.

The success of the February-April NextGen 7s season was particularly encouraging, not only as providing prep for what became a successful SVNS World Championship campaign, but enabling players to go straight into Super Rugby Women’s pre-season in May, aligning with the XVs players returning from the Pacific Four Series.

The inclusion of sevens players will inevitably address two key areas that currently separate Australian women’s rugby from the best women’s teams: speed and match intensity.

The Australian set piece has made significant improvements over the last few months, their 2026 Pacific Four Series campaign seeing the side achieve a lineout success rate of nearly 90 per cent, with a 80 per cent success rate at the scrum.

Yet, across the series, the side conceded nearly half of their tries in the final 20 minutes of games, frequently being put away by the speed of opposition who could find another gear.

It’s what makes the injection of sevens – the sport where speed and intensity is arguably the most critical element to success, so promising, with the competition for positions generated naturally leading to the rising tide lifting all ships on the field.

A productive learning environment will inevitably benefit sevens as well, with players like Whitaker in a prime position to flourish should she be called in to make a debut in the Aussie Sevens programme.

The merging of the Wallaroos programme with the Aussie Sevens to make the women’s code fully professional in November will inevitably colour much of the next few months of discourse, even more so when we know who will coach the national side moving forward.

Once that process is complete, regular exposure for those players to a high performance environment will do wonders, giving them the chance to develop their craft full-time.

The fact the merging of the two programmes is already yielding results shows just how high the ceiling is down under.