Euro camp serves as major boost to emerging teams

Fourteen women's rugby international sides recently took part in the annual Emerging Nations Camp in Hungary where developing European sides came together for expert training.

The sixth edition of the event saw teams including Bulgaria, Denmark and Hungary compete while Slovakia made their first ever appearance on the international stage.

The camp is organised every year by the Austrian and Hungarian Unions and supported by IRB and FIRA-AER. This years training camp was led by well-known coaches Graham Smith and Simon Jones and England womens player Sarah Hunter. Italian referee Viorel Popescu was also part of the camp.

The full list of participating teams were Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Hungary, Luxembourg, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Poland, Poland B, Nada Split (Coatian club), the Czech Republic and the Czech U19 team.

For the Slovak team it was their first international appearance ever in their very short history with the first Slovak female team only established last year at the Slovan Bratislava rugby club.

On the final day of the camp, the squads were split into two pools for games, with strong showings by the Croatian side and the Czech U19 team in one pool while the full Czechs won the other pool with a final 27- 5 win over Poland.

Slovakian prop Katarna Kubalov said the tournament would prove a big boost to the development of the sport. We have been training properly last September and the camp was for us fantastic move forward. We were little nervous but all of the sessions were great andvery helpful - we started from the basics and moved on. We will now be able to use some of the training methods that we learned. I would like to say thanks to the Czech girls particularly for their help and support. We scored our first international points and we plan to become a lot stronger in the next few years.

Kubalov added that there were plans for many more competitions for the developing sides to take part in.

Our other plans in the near future are to organise first womens internationaltournament in Bratislava with one Austrian and two Czech teams in June, participation in another Slovakian tournament in Trnava also in June and participation in the International Prague Beach Rugby Tournament in July. Long term we plan to take a part in the European 7s Championship 2012.

Klra Hladilov, the captain of the Czech team added that the camp was hugely beneficial.

I took part at five out of six ENT Camps and the level of the game and the players is growing continuously. The majority of the teams taking part are from Division B of 7s European Championship but there are no big differences between teams from Division A (where the Czech Team plays).

The Czech U19 team was great with training and playing and a lot of its players are considered as members of the wider selection for the Czech Team now. For us - the older ones - it was perfect to watch their enthusiasm and fighting spirit.