The AD Penner Park pitch was busy with a high school female rugby 7s tournament Friday.

Tahnee Grosskopf has been a Physical Education teacher at the SRSS for 9 years and started the Rugby program in 2017. 

Grosskopf has played rugby all her life,  

“My mom actually played for Team Canada, so I grew up on the rugby fields and I always had such a great experience and made some lifelong friends playing it. And I was thinking at our school, especially with, you know, having a football team for the boys, we didn't really have that counterpart for the girls. So, I thought it was really important that we have that at our school.” 

Grosskopf says they started the tournament in order to give the girls a chance to play at the end of the league season. 

“We had so much fun last year, we thought we would do it again, even though we do have finals this year for our girls.” 

Grosskopf says the program did have a couple of successful years pre-COVID.  

“Then we had to take a little break, so we've kind of been rebuilding now and we have a really young group, lots of grade nines and 10s, but they've been doing awesome.” 

She notes one thing they have always encouraged the players is community.  

“Like, we're a family and supporting each other. So that's kind of our main goal and then if we win along with that, that's always a bonus.”  

The Friday games were “just for fun” says Grosskopf, though the SRSS Sabres ended up winning the tournament. 

Four teams from across Manitoba were in the tournament, including Stonewall, Vincent Massey from Brandon, Lorette, and the host team, Steinbach Regional.