Women's Rugby World Cup - a personal experience of being a Christian at a major competition

There were two Christians in Sport representatives at the Women’s Rugby World Cup in 2002 Bridget Montgomery (Ireland), and Ann O’Flynn (England). Ann reports:

In the last year Bridget and I had both taken time out from our professional careers, of medicine and veterinary work respectively, to concentrate on our rugby.. We both felt strongly that God had called us to be there, standing strong for him, amongst our team-mates; we were both struck by what a privilege it was to be able to serve God doing something we loved so much!

During the competition we had hoped to be able to meet up regularly and even go to church together. However, on arriving in Spain we discovered our hotels were nearly two hours apart and, with the daily training programmes we each had with our own squads, we soon discovered it was going to be impossible to get together. In fact we only saw each other at the opening ceremony, and the official end of tournament World Cup Dinner on the last night after the final. So, we had to rely on text messages, the odd phone call before crucial times and good, old-fashioned, solitary prayer and Bible study! But it was so encouraging knowing there was another Christian around.

Personally, I found it hard to keep my discipline of a morning quiet time. Such an intensive programme of training, games and team meetings and video analysis, combined with the Barcelona heat, meant that I began to crave every extra minute in bed in the morning. However I knew it was crucial to keep doing it, as out there I had nothing else I could rely on except God. I did find reading my Bible was great pre-match preparation; on those tense bus journeys when no-one really wants to talk, it was a great help in focusing my mind on what was really important and why I was there. I found Proverbs 3:5-6 a really helpful passage to remind me to keep trusting God ‘with all my heart’. I began to realise that this meant I had to let everything go and hand it over to God, not just the little ‘pockets’ of my life I was happy for him to ‘handle’ every now and then. It is ironic, but it took the most important, crucial time for me to realise this – how God must despair of me, I only ‘get it' right at the end of a big issue, when it would have surely been easier to do so right at the beginning!

Reading my Bible was especially helpful with the constant pressure of selection for the next match hanging over our heads, and worries about performing at my very best when called off the bench at short notice. These are issues that as ‘athletes’ striving to be the best we can be, we long to hang on to, and are often unwilling to give over to God, because they are really personal. We might never share them with our coach or any team-mates because that would be seen as a weakness, or just inappropriate in some circumstances – we are told endlessly to be ‘mentally tough’ and outside of the Christian world, where else can you go with these kinds of self-doubts? Thankfully, we have a God who is personal and loving, and who knows our deepest doubts probably even before we do - what a relief!

My team struggled to find our form in the early part of the tournament, but managed to ‘click’ well in the semi-final against Canada – that was a real answer to prayer for me! We came into the tournament with a strong feeling in the squad that we could win it, but were gutted to eventually lose narrowly to New Zealand in the final; I spent most of the match on the bench so it was especially frustrating for me to watch our team under-perform, we just didn’t play as well as we can do. So although I came away initially very disappointed, it was a great experience, and it would take pages to recount all the things we got up to, but it was made all the more special by knowing that whatever the result we could each rejoice in using our God-given talents to show our worship for God in playing our sport!

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