USA
Team USA Olympian and rugby sevens player Kristi Kirshe lives and breathes rugby.
Having recently competed with Team USA at the Vancouver Sevens taking out 5th place and the LA Sevens placing 3rd, Kristi is a full-time resident athlete with the USA Sevens program, and now has her sights firmly set on the Paris Olympics.
Although she found rugby later in life, Kristi says she took to the sport like a duck to water, impressively being accepted into the USA residency, AND making her debut on the World Rugby Sevens Series, for the USA Women’s team just 11 months after her first ever rugby practice.
Now with two successful North American stops under their belt, Kristi says Team USA are continuing to focus on their preparations in the lead up to the Paris Olympics in July.
“We still have three more tournaments this year as part of our world series before we get to the Olympics,” she says. “With every tournament, our performance is getting incrementally better so now it’s just a matter of improving at each of the remaining tournaments so that by the time we get to Paris, we can peak and are at the top of our game.”
Kristi’s Rugby Journey
“When I was a little kid, I played every sport I could get my hands on,” she says. “Basketball, football, soccer, lacrosse; I loved sports and had a very diverse selection of sports under my belt by the time I reached my early 20s.”
However, it was not until she was 23-years-old that Kristi was introduced to rugby by a friend who had played club rugby in college.
“I found rugby really late in life,” she says. “It was after I finished university and was living in Boston. At the time, I was not playing sport and I felt kind of lost without a sport in my life. A friend of mine who had played club rugby in college and knew people in the Boston Women’s Rugby Club suggested I go and try it out.”
Because Kristi had previously been playing soccer at Williams College, she was initially reluctant to give rugby a chance.
“At first, I absolutely refused,” she says. “I said, ‘No, I’m a soccer player and it’s too late for me to pick up a new sport at this age.’ But, my friend kept pushing me, and I did really miss the camaraderie of playing sport, so I finally caved in and went along to a rugby practice session.”
Kristi says that despite a disastrous start, she began to get into the swing of things and from that moment on, it was rugby all the way.
“After a few practices, I sort of got my feet under me and started to understand more of what was going on,” she says. “And, then it just clicked. I felt like this is the sport that I was waiting to find my entire life and I just fell in love with it. I kind of hit the ground running from there, going on to play with Boston Women’s for a season, then a season with Northeast Academy 7s, then was recruited by the USA in January 2019, and have been a full-time resident with their program ever since. This was all only 11 months after my first practice, so it was a pretty crazy journey but I’m very thankful for the opportunities that rugby has given me.”
Being part of the Olympic program with USA rugby 7s means Kristi now trains full-time in San Diego, California at the Chula Vista Elite Training Center as part of the 23 full-time women’s rugby national ‘player pool’, of which 13 players are selected for each World Rugby sevens event.
“Our season runs from December to May, and we compete at eight tournaments in that time frame,” she says. “We are all full-time rugby players; we literally live and breathe rugby every day of the week. We train all year round and travelling to compete in these big tournaments is critical to our development, and to the development of rugby in America generally, especially in an Olympic year.”
The Road to Paris
The recent North American stops in Vancouver and LA were overall successful for Team USA, placing 5th and 3rd respectively, and Kristi says playing in front a home crowd in Los Angeles for the first time in five years was a huge morale boost for the women.
“LA has historically just been a men’s series stop and this was the first year it was also a women’s series stop,” she says. “This is the first time that we, as a women’s program, have gotten to play at home since Glendale in 2019 when we took 1st place. We were really excited going into that LA weekend, and we had some of our highest scoring games there. We took out 3rd, which was our first podium finish of the season, which we were really really happy with.And, as the team draws closer to a Paris kick off, Kristi says compared with Tokyo 2020 (played in 2021), the team now is more dynamic, adaptable, fitter, and faster.“I was also part of the team at Tokyo, and I think the difference in teams really has a lot to do with how the game has changed since then,” she says. “Sevens has gotten so much more competitive, and I think that shows in our current team. I think that we have more well-rounded rugby players now than we did going into Tokyo. It’s been really exciting to see just how dynamic and adaptable we can be, and we are much tighter now as a team. It’s really special, and I can’t wait to see how we progress through to Paris.”
The Future is Female
Kristi says it has been nothing short of exciting to see how women’s rugby has developed since she first began on the series in 2019 at the Sydney 7s.
“The women’s game has gotten so much faster, and every game has gotten so much more competitive. There are no easy games anymore,” she says. “Every game, you must go into it with the knowledge that it’s going to be an absolute battle, because I think that every team is competing now in a way that they never have before. It has become one of those things where anyone can beat anyone on any given day.
She says the growing popularity of women’s rugby is also very inspiring, especially as it relates to the bigger picture of empowering more and more women and girls, both in the USA and the region at large.
“From a grander perspective, rugby encourages strong women and strong bodies,” she says. “It shows us that it’s so much more about what your body can do, than about what your body looks like, which is what we hear a lot in society. I’ve always loved the empowerment that I feel from playing rugby and the confidence it’s given me in all aspects of my life, and I’m really excited to see more girls starting to play and reaping the wider confidence and self-belief benefits that rugby brings.”
And, Kristi says the next few months will be pivotal for the development of women’s rugby in America, especially with an Olympic performance on the horizon.
“I think women’s rugby, especially in the US right now, is in a place where us having a really great performance at the Olympics could help put women’s rugby on the map here,” she says. “The Olympics is our biggest platform and us having a medal performance at the Olympics could do amazing things for the future of rugby in the US and inspire our next generation of female rugby players.”
When asked about the future, Kristi says:
“I’m going to be here until the wheels fall off! In an ideal world, I would really love to stick around for another Olympic cycle and really try to ground out my career at the LA 2028 Olympics – I would love to get to play an Olympics on home soil, that would be the icing on the cake. Honestly, this is my dream job, and I can’t really imagine doing anything else, so I just want to continue to play and represent my country in the best way I can so I can inspire other women to do the same.”
