UKAF head coach Sarah Mitchelson 'happy' with squad selection ahead of IDRC
UK Armed Forces women's head coach Warrant Officer 2 Sarah Mitchelson has told BFBS Sport that she thinks the team is the "strongest we could possibly have" ahead of their IDRC opener against Tonga.
WO2 Mitchelson will be leading her carefully selected squad into the highly anticipated IDRC tournament, which officially gets underway with the opening ceremony on 15 August.
She said: "There are still some other players that we would've liked to have in the squad, but I still think that we've got the strongest squad we could possibly have out of everything really.
"In this role, there's no guarantee that you'll always get the players, and that's not down to injury, it's down to deployments and how busy everybody is, but I'm happy with the squad that we've managed to select for this."
With a mixture of returning players from the 2022 IDRC tournament as well as a number of newcomers, WO2 Mitchelson recalled the difficult phone calls she made to players who, in the end, didn't make the cut.
"It's not nice having to give that call," she said. "Everyone just wants us to do well as a squad, and everyone has backed the decision, and everyone is here for the right reasons and, yeah, they're ready to go."
WO2 Mitchelson is also the head coach of the highly successful British Army women's rugby team.
She points out that the team is just "focusing on ourselves" despite not knowing much about the opposition teams they will be facing.
She said: "It's completely the unknown – it's really hard to train for someone you've never seen play, you don't really know much about them, so we're just really concentrating on ourselves.
"We're just working on us and what we're good at, and hopefully that'll be good enough to put the wins in."
UKAF will face Tonga in their opening match on Sunday, the team they beat in the plate final in the last IDRC tournament held in New Zealand.
WO2 Mitchelson says that they "underestimated the competition" in 2022 and she now hopes that her team can go a step further in their home tournament.
"When we went to New Zealand, we weren't prepared enough," she recalled.
"I think this year, we've definitely fixed that, and I think we underestimated the competition – I think every team that'll turn up here will be prepared.
"They've known for a while and they wouldn't have said yes to the tournament unless they were prepared to turn up with a good squad, so I'm expecting a challenge in every game that we play."
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