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It was hardly a surprise on Monday morning when World Rugby announced that Canada’s Sophie de Goede had been nominated for Women’s 15s Player of the Year.
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Alongside England’s Meg Jones and New Zealand’s Jorja Miller, the 26-year-old will find out if she has won women’s rugby’s top individual prize at full-time of the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup final.
This weekend in the World Cup final the second row hopes to crown Canada as best in class for the first time and spoil the Red Roses party in their own backyard.
When De Goede lines up in Saturday’s final it will be just her ninth game of 2025 and just over three months after her return to play after a 13 month lay-off with an ACL injury.
The timing of that injury was more frustrating than anything else for the forward. Several months earlier she had helped her country to a first-ever win over the Black Ferns and to second in the World Rugby rankings, but instead of the 2024 Olympic Games and a home WXV 1 campaign to look forward to, a road to recovery lay ahead of her.
On Saturday afternoon de Goede will have played in half the number of games that Jones has turned out in. But such has been her impact, it made complete sense to see the lock forward named as one of the top three players in the world this year.
“If anybody was going to do it in that way, it was going to be SdG,” Dan Valley, her former Canada U18 and Queen’s University coach, said.
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“There’s not many players in the world that could play their way into a World Player of the Year nomination having had 50 per cent of the opportunities relative to the other nominees. But listen, I’ve learned not to be surprised.”
It is entirely possible that de Goede has enjoyed one of the all-time individual performances at a Rugby World Cup.
Ahead of the Twickenham final the 26-year-old has carried more than anyone else in the competition (85), made the most offloads (11), won the most lineouts (36) and kicked the most goals (21). Those are just the stats she tops.
Over the course of her 356 minutes on the turf the British Columbia native has been directly involved in seven tries (three tries and four assists), made 471 metres with the ball (seventh-most in the World Cup), completed 68 tackles (joint-fifth with England’s Morwenna Talling) and won five turnovers (tied-sixth with Meg Jones).
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Truly there is no secret sauce to what the 26-year-old’s performances. It is what she does.
In the wake of her Mastercard Player of the Match performance against Australia in the quarter-finals, Canada head coach, Kévin Rouet, said that she was an “amazing rugby player”.
Two weeks prior to that in Salford after his team’s 42-0 drubbing of Wales he beamed when highlighting how well the team had performed in her absence, which in some ways made her return to the setup easier. He also described her as “complete”.
“She’s one of our best players,” Rouet said. “She’s a complete player. She can carry. She can tackle. She can kick. She can do all of that and I think the fact that she has come back from injury and the team was functioning without her, it’s good for her.
“She had 20 carries (against Wales), but for her to have 20 carries we have players at 20 breakdowns.
“She’s important but I know if I don’t have another player to clear the breakdowns and open the space for Sophie, it is not the same game for her. You work to open the space for Sophie.”
From an early age De Goede was earmarked as a generational talent. When Valley first met the fledgling international when she was part of his Canada U18s side (which also contained fly-half Taylor Perry) she was a basketball loving teen.
Then she operated at fly-half before being asked to move into the forward pack. She did not bat an eyelid. It was just another set of skills to develop. Something else to become great at.
Valley’s only ever qualm was that as she ran riot on the rugby field as a one-person wrecking crew, her university teammates struggled to keep up. The answer? To become predictably unpredictable. There is little doubt that De Goede has done that.
In the 2020/21 season, with rugby a non-starter in Canada because of covid, she spent a season with Saracens in the Allianz Premier 15s (now Premiership Women’s Rugby) where she helped Alex Austerberry’s team to a domestic title before returning to Queen’s more mature and took the team to their first U Sports’ National Championship in 2022.
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That year she also played her part in a bronze medal finish for her university at the National Championships in basketball.
As goodbyes to education go, De Goede’s was pretty perfect. Before anyone knew it she was making her Test rugby debut in the 2022 Pacific Four Series. She missed her graduation to be there.
Those roots of a youth spent in the backfield are still present in the way De Goede plays now. She regularly drops into the backs as an extra receiver to help her team stay on the front foot, can kick under the immense pressure of harrying defenders with almost a shrug of her shoulders and all this before being proficient at everything you’d expect of a forward. A head coach’s dream. An opponent’s nightmare.
Even as one of the world’s most foremost players there is a constant desire to get better. When the 26-year-old spoke to RugbyPass in May she opened up about her desire to become a more abrasive and physically dominant player. To become more complete as an all-court player.
“I look at the behaviours and the habits and the dedication to her craft,” Valley said. “That has existed since the day that I met her at a rugby pitch in Ottawa when I watched her compete for the BC U16s as a fly-half.
“That commitment to being excellent, or striving to be excellent all the time, that has existed since the day I met Soph.
“I think that’s really cool because I think when you look at the evolution of Sophie as a rugby player, it’s very easy to connect that back to that commitment to her craft for decades.
“The person hasn’t changed. But it is because the person hasn’t changed that the rugby evolution has been what it is. Even when you look at the setback she experienced with her ACL injury, it was interesting to speak with her immediately following that and quickly she made a reference to ‘Sophie 2.0’.
“That was just the most Sophie thing I’ve ever heard. And the least surprising thing I’ve ever heard.”
“She has that relentless pursuit of excellence, that is also highly competitive in any aspect of any game,” Canada teammate Laetitia Royer said.
“You can trust that she will bring the best version of herself. She is the hardest worker, and she had the biggest challenge to overcome. I was sure she would have come back even bigger and even better because that’s what challenge does to you.
“You grow when you’re ready to take on the challenge, and she grew so much as a person and as a rugby player.”
There is a certain degree of destiny to everything that De Goede does on a rugby field. Her parents, Hans and Stephanie, both captained Canada in their own respective playing days from the back-row before they moved into rugby administration roles.
Her unique rugby education has meant de Goede was a near-constant at Canada games from her earliest years. She even has the ticket from the North Americans 2014 Rugby World Cup final loss to England on her dresser at home in British Columbia.
Such is her stature in the Canadian rugby landscape, she first captained her country at a World Cup aged just 23. Even with the weight of a nation on her shoulders she continued to excel.
Throughout the World Cup the 26-year-old has been a constant in front of the media. Her performances have often warranted a quick chat at full-time, a full length video feature pre-match or the short walk from the changing room to a mixed zone to face journalists after a game.
There you get to see the cogs turn first-hand as a player at the top of her game dissects everything that had happened across the past two hours effortlessly.
“I think those interviews are the perfect microcosm of SdG,” Valley, who also leads Canada’s Women’s U23s, said.
“Everything there is incredibly authentic. It is genuine. It is grace under pressure. She doesn’t know what questions are coming her way in those moments and yet she is still able to put together these congruent, articulate thoughts.
“I often go back to the interview that she made after the World Cup semi-final (in 2022) right after they lose. They were on the precipice of doing something and yet she was able to gather herself.
“If we as a rugby nation can get behind that and support our athletes appropriately, we’re on track to be the best in the world.
“Every time I watch them (interviews), I think that is what you need to know. That is who Sophie is. It’s incredibly cool.”
Destiny, fortune, luck, fate, whatever you want to call it, all of De Goede’s life so far has led her to Allianz Stadium this weekend. Her career will not be defined by whatever result is decided under early autumn skies.
But it could dictate the course of Canadian rugby for the next decade. Maybe longer. That is what de Goede and her teammates are playing for.
The North Americans will have a mountain to climb. Support for England will be rampant in TW2, which Rouet has aimed to tackle by playing crowd noise during his training sessions this week.
In De Goede, everyone willing red jerseys to victory knows that there is a difference making player among their ranks.
A player capable, and willing, to take a game by the scruff of its neck. Who can make Canada world champions for the very first time.
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