Hi my name is Ellie W , I am 19 and my sport is rugby. I am part of the young start program. I started watching the men’s six nations every year with my dad as he used to play rugby when he was younger. I thought I’d love to play rugby one day and didn’t start playing until I was 17. My friend started playing for our local women’s team and suggested that I join and we both went along for our first training session. We could train but only started doing contact at 18.

When I went into high school my mum had suggested a sports programme that was run by SSF [Scottish Sports Futures] called Twilight. It was multisport. It helped me fall in love with sport before I got involved with playing rugby. A couple of months later there was a young leaders programme that was also run by SSF to help me coach young people in sport. My coach, Maciek, from SSF encouraged me to join my clan rugby team as a participant and then help out as a coach. I have been to events and schools to talk about the clan and encourage people to come along and try it.

Maciek told me about the Young Start programme and I had to submit it that day and it sounded like such a good opportunity for me and I signed up and was very excited as I was getting to meet new people , learn new skills , develop my skills and get my level 1 rugby coaching. I had online courses the first one was communications and the second one was human connections and then we had the young start/panel residential September weekend with wheels to water , getting to try other sports , we got to know each other through ice breaker challenges , we went trampolining , had food and hung out. We did the disability , advocacy and sport course in the morning and then in the afternoon we did boccia which was very fun. I have also got to do my first aid course through young start and passed