Source: RugbyPass
Written By: Imogen Ainsworth
o celebrate International Women’s Day, RugbyPass are sharing a series of exclusive interviews with the six female head coaches on the HSBC SVNS Series, the first with Canada’s Jocelyn Barrieau. Women currently make up 25% of head coaching roles across all 24 teams involved in the Series, with even fewer leading 15s teams, and all of their unique stories must be honoured.
Following Canada’s silver medal at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and a home WXV 1 for the 15s team, Barrieau took her place as head coach of the women’s sevens team – something she tells RugbyPass is ‘the biggest honour, in terms of my coaching life, that I will ever have’.
She joined a significant movement of women to top coaching jobs on the HSBC SVNS Series, seeing the number of female head coaches rise from one in the 2023/24 season, to six – meaning that 50% of the women’s teams are now coached by women.
Formerly Canada’s assistant coach before she took over from Jack Hanratty, Barrieau started her sevens coaching journey with the Stingers men’s team at Concordia University.
After first recognising her relative privilege, Barrieau profoundly shared what International Women’s Day signifies for her.
“Sometimes we don’t necessarily reflect on the fact that there are still a few inequalities and injustices in the world. I’m a white woman, so I have privilege, and there is still a lot going on in Canada where there’s still missing and murdered indigenous women, and it’s off the charts the amount of violence that’s happening there. There’s been a lot of intimate partner violence in Canada,” she emphasised.
“Those are the moments that you take and you reflect and say okay, there are still some inequalities in this world and while things are getting better, it’s important to reflect and talk about it, and to talk about being a woman and not just release it or diminish it. We must continue talking about it, especially with younger
women.”
Last year, the sole female head coach on the HSBC SVNS series, Emilie Bydwell, made history as the first woman to coach a team to an Olympic rugby medal when the USA took a stunning bronze against Australia in Paris.
In January, Great Britain Women’s Sevens coach Giselle Mather was a guest on The Good, The Scaz & The Rugby, where she discussed a quote from Bydwell about how care, connection, and empathy are often not valued as leadership qualities. The original quote came from a Premier Rugby Sevens interview, which featured Bydwell and Barrieau alongside each other, with the USA coach discussing the strength of their shared qualities.
Barrieau’s core values as a coach align similarly with those three components, and they have in fact shaped who she is as a leader and a person.
“I talk about passion, pride, and love – passion, fierté, et amour in French. Those are my three pillars and they’ve been in place for almost 10 years. I look at them every year and assess whether I’m living my life by those.
“They’re different, and I know that the way that I set up environments and leadership within those uses those three pillars all the time. I ask myself, are we being passionate about what we’re doing? Passionate doesn’t mean yelling it from the rooftops, but are we fully invested in what we’re doing? Are we proud of who we are?
“That element of pride comes from me being open and out with my partner, married to my wife, and now having a family and being super proud of that. Also being super proud of where I’m from and the languages I speak, because in Canada there are different languages. I’m always proud of where I’m from,” the Québécois coach said.
The third pillar, love – amour – was derived from Argentina’s men’s team at the 2007 Rugby World Cup, Barrieau recalls. In the competition, Los Pumas reached the semi-finals for the first time, and would eventually finish third, their best-ever placing to this day.
“I was in a coaching conference and I saw this video of their locker room and they had this white flip chart,” she begins, before recounting the absence of social media at the time and sharing a laugh while wondering how the footage was shared in the first place.
“In the middle of this poster, it had the word love. I took that moment, and said to myself, ‘If that team can be loving, have standards, and perform well, then any team I coach can do that if I’m led by love and caring about these players I coach’.
“Ever since, that’s been a central tenet of everything I’ve done. I want to show loving leadership for the staff and players I lead and the organisation I’m in. Life is short – and that’s the way I want to be in it.”
