| A message from Phil Waugh,
Rugby Australia CEO
Dear friends of Team Rugby,
Thank you for your support throughout the year, and I hope to be able to celebrate a more successful year in 2024 with you. This year has been quite the roller-coaster for Australian Rugby… We had some genuine highs throughout the year, and some well-publicised lows.
Let’s start with the good news from 2023 first – our women’s teams! This month, our Aussie Women’s Sevens team has returned to the HSBC SVNS World Series with a bang, winning in both Dubai and Cape Town – they are undefeated through 12 matches to start the season, and they have been incredible to watch! The Wallaroos made huge strides again in 2023, topping off the year by finishing third in World Rugby’s new WXV competition.
I can also tell you that our participation numbers in community Rugby continue to grow and guess where the largest growth is coming from? Women and girls!
It is clear that this is a huge opportunity for our sport – and we have just invested in our first full-time Wallaroos head coach, the hugely respected Jo Yapp, and our first dedicated Women’s High Performance Manager in Jaime Fernandez. The Wallaroos will play more home Test matches than ever before in 2024, and we will announce the next phase of our investment plan in Women’s Rugby in the new year.
Our Men’s Sevens team made great progress over the first two rounds of the season as well with a young team – they have a lot of experience to come back into the squad, and a rookie by the name of Michael Hooper looks a chance of making the squad for Perth SVNS on 26-28 January.
The Sevens program will be a huge focus of 2024 – not only as the teams battle it out on home soil in Perth, but as they go for gold at the largest sporting event in the world next year, the Paris Olympics.
It was a tough season for the Wallabies – and especially, a tough Rugby World Cup. We are in the process of finalising our review into the 2023 season, as we strive to ensure we learn valuable lessons from the experience. The silver lining is that we now have an opportunity to build a new Wallabies program from scratch, led by a new Director of High Performance and, ultimately, a new Wallabies coach and staff.
In recent months, we have been communicating about our plans to align our Super Rugby clubs’ high-performance programs with our national programs to ensure that all stakeholders in the game are all pushing in the same direction. This plan will prioritise the community game as well as building the right pathways and high-performance structures. We have seen the Waratahs fully commit to this process, and we remain in discussion with the other clubs and Member Unions. One thing is clear, all five Australian Super Rugby clubs agree that high-performance alignment is critical.
In addition to this transformation of the sport, we have a lot of footy to look forward to in 2024! Beginning with the Perth SVNS, then we are straight into Super Rugby Pacific and Super Rugby Women, the U20 TRC on the Sunshine Coast, the Olympic Games, four home Wallaroos Test matches, six home Wallabies Tests and an end-of-season Grand Slam tour to the UK and Ireland.
It promises to be an exciting smorgasbord of Rugby in all forms in 2024!
Once again, on behalf of Rugby Australia, my most sincere thanks for your support in 2023. I know it has been a rough ride at times this year, which only makes your support even more important and more meaningful. As we look ahead to the Lions Tour in 2025, home Rugby World Cups in 2027 and 2029, and a home Olympics in 2032, I am confident that we are putting the right systems in place for success – beginning next year.
Until then, please enjoy the holiday period with your families and loved ones, and I hope to see you at a game in 2024.
Yours sincerely,
Phil Waugh
CEO, Rugby Australia |
