In a white-walled university laboratory, four female student rugby players are strapped face-down onto what look like upside-down rowing machines.
As belts are tightened across their backs, sensors are adjusted to fit snugly around their heads.
It isn’t the most dignified way to spend a Thursday afternoon, but the research at Swansea University could be fundamental to the future of women’s rugby.
The machines test the strength of the players’ necks, both forward and back, and side-to-side. Neck strength in women players has emerged as a significant factor in preventing concussions and any resulting neurological damage.
Sky News has been given exclusive access to the university’s work, which is funded by the governing body World Rugby, at a time when the sport is growing in popularity among women and girls.
The success of England’s ‘Red Roses’ in last year’s World Cup fuelled a boom in the sport’s popularity. But safety research has, until now, been heavily focused on the men’s game.
“Fifteen or 20 times a game, for university women, we saw these direct head-to-ground impacts, where the head would just whiplash and hit the ground very hard,” said Dr Elisabeth Williams, the university’s programme director for sport and exercise science.
“That hadn’t previously been documented as a primary mechanism of head trauma in rugby because most of those studies were done at the elite level and mostly in males.”
That imbalance in research between the men’s and women’s game is now being corrected.
“Males tend to have quite a lot stronger necks or cervical spines than females do. It’s an impact sport, it’s a collision sport, that’s why we do it, it’s why we love it,” Dr Elisabeth Williams said.
“But when a female neck, female head undergoes a similar loading force to a male head and neck, it can respond quite differently.”
The machines in the lab provide readings of neck strength so players can work on improving it.
Researcher Sarah Clark said: “The stronger the neck, the less likely they are to be concussed.
“They can sort of reinforce themselves before they get this whiplashing effect.”
‘I know what it is now’
The questions about the impact of concussions in rugby are not new. More than 1,000 former players have filed a lawsuit against the sport’s governing bodies.
Among the hundreds of high-profile men who have joined the lawsuit are just a few women, including Non Evans.
Capped 87 times for Wales, she played in an era, she says, when people took little notice of concussion.
“I didn’t think it had an impact until about 10 years ago when I started not feeling myself. I was forgetful, walking into rooms and wondering: ‘Why did I come in here?’
“I’d have headaches. I felt sick, emotional. And I put it all down to the menopause because I was in my early 40s. But as time went on and people who were speaking out about concussion and rugby, I thought: ‘Oh, maybe they’ve got something here’.”
She has undergone neurological tests, which have confirmed what she suspected.
“When they tell you ‘this is an injury you’ve had from all the impact’ you suddenly think: ‘Wow, I know what it is now’. I do feel better now that I’ve had the tests done and I know that it has had an impact on my behaviour.”
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Would she make different decisions knowing that now?
“I wouldn’t have changed it. It has defined me as a person, my rugby career, and given me so much: friends, travel, experiences that I’ve taken on in life.
“Hopefully, I will be okay, and things won’t get worse, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
In a statement, a World Rugby spokesperson said: “Player welfare is at the heart of everything World Rugby does. We recognise that the women’s game and women player welfare are very different to men.
“We’ve made funding of research into women’s specific player welfare one of our top priorities. Additionally, World Rugby has a golden rule that any research we fund must include a cohort of at least 50% female players before we’ll consider supporting it.”
‘It’s vital that we look after them’
On a wet and windy Sunday morning in Cheshire, the girls of Winnington Park Rugby Club’s under-14s are throwing themselves into a muddy practice match.
The enthusiasm for the game is clear here, and the parents sheltering on the touchline already see a sport changing rapidly.
“When I was a kid, if you got a bang on the head, you got the smelling salts or a wet sponge on your head and then carried on,” said dad Steven Tyrer.
“Now obviously we’re all a little bit more aware of what the repercussions can be, and it’s vital that we look after them.”
“With the couple of injuries that we’ve seen, I felt like the coaches were better at knowing what to do than even the paramedics when they arrived,” said mum Jane Casey.
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Dave Clinch said he does worry about the safety of his daughter – “but I don’t want to take her away from getting involved in things like this”.
He added: “We’ve got a headguard for her. I’ve taken her to hospital a couple of times with some knocks and scrapes, but she keeps coming back, she loves it.”
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Winnington Park coach Nial Phillips said the benefits of physical activity, team spirit and positive self-image were the real values of the sport.
“You’ve got to get those foundations. A girl who is injured all the time won’t want to carry on playing rugby.”
At Winnington Park – and in Swansea – there is a case for preparing the young.
Dr Williams said: “I have a daughter who’s coming up four and she will undoubtedly want to play rugby.
“What we’re doing now is a very graduated core strength building programme, appropriate for a three-year-old obviously, so when she says ‘Mummy, I want to play rugby’ I know that she’s fortified and she’s had that basic training.”
