Respect for young women rugby players in Namata District School in Tailevu has been a positive indicator of the impact of the Get Into Rugby (GIR) Plus program, which took part in the GIR Plus festival for primary schools at Bidesi Ground in Laucala Bay, Suva earlier this week.
Team coach Neli Nabogi spoke of the program’s effect on the students taking part in the one-day tournament.
“First of all, they were very close up because this is a program that consists of life skills and it is also a program that is trying to stop violence and proclaiming about stopping violence so children were very reluctant in the very beginning to voice what they had faced but as the journey continues, then they started to speak up,” Nabogi said.
While the GIR Plus meet celebrated the infusion of holistic development through sports, the Namata team had only a week to prepare for the tournament.
Meanwhile, Nabogi who serves as a teacher in the school, had implemented the GIR Plus program in Namata in 2018 and recalled the hurdles as a women sporting official she navigated to get the program to where it was now.
“Back then, the gender expectation was still high so I was nervous when I started off because it was a men dominant sport but because of the passion that I had for rugby and the passion that I had for the children teaching them, that’s what carried me and (has) been my source of strength.
