In 2019, first-year Rachel Smith sat in a Lethbridge locker room at halftime, down by seven points.
She’s never been here before. Nobody has.
This is the first time the UBC women’s rugby team has made it to a Canada West (CW) championship final. They were the underdogs — facing the three-peat conference champions — but head coach Dean Murten wasn’t giving up on his team.
“Dean was just like, ‘You guys have to leave it all out there for each other — just give it everything you've got, empty the tank, put your body on the line for each other,’” said Smith. “And we really did. We just went out there and completely flipped the switch.”
“We were not gonna lose that game.”
And they didn’t. The team rallied to score two tries, with Smith scoring the last try to cement the 26–12 win and their first CW championship banner in UBC history.
“At the time, you don't even realize it's going to be a shift because you don't know what the future holds,” said Smith, now a fifth-year. “But looking back now, I'm like, ‘Wow, that was a huge moment for our program.’”
The backstory
Although BC is now known for its excellent rugby programs, the women’s rugby team, historically, didn’t have a lot of luck.
From its inception in 1999 to 2014, they had a 27–51–3 record, winning only 33 per cent of their conference games. Most incoming players decided to go to UVic instead of UBC, according to Shoshanah Seumanutafa, who played on the women’s rugby team from 2017–23.
“We barely had enough girls to field the team. Sometimes you have 15 starters, and sometimes we would have maybe 17 players in total able to play,” said Seumanutafa.
The program was so unsuccessful, it almost was stripped of varsity status.
In 2013, UBC started a review of their varsity programs, planning to demote some teams to competitive sports teams in order “to protect the long-term sustainability of the Athletic and Recreation Department (Vancouver campus) programs,” according to a UBC press release.
“The University simply cannot sustain excellence for 29 varsity teams into the future on our current or likely future budget,” wrote then-UBC President Stephen J. Toope in a UBC broadcast.
The multi-staged review focused on competitive success, support for success, community support, partnerships and alignment with the university’s mission — with the most weighting coming from the last five years’ competitive achievements. For women’s rugby, this was a problem.
Not only was their last five year record 8–23, they also underwent coaching changes in 2013, hiring Maria Gallo as the head coach and Murten as an assistant coach. However, Gallo was also a professor in the kinesiology department and a primary advisor for kinesiology and high performance coaching and technical leadership master’s students.
“It was probably really hard for her to be present full time when she actually has another job,” said Seumanutafa.
According to October 2013 coverage from The Ubyssey, the women’s rugby program had one of the lowest varsity budgets and Gallo paid assistant coaches out of her own honorarium.
All this culminated in the women’s rugby team being in an “unsafe” standing after the first stage of the review. When the review was over, women’s rugby ultimately made the cut, but only because of a hybrid funding model where they have to procure some of their own funding.
“People stepped up and supported financially, and the people who did [support] financially said, ‘We need a full time coach,’” said Murten in an interview with The Ubyssey.
Gallo remained head coach until the 2017/18 season, becoming the team’s skills coach until 2021/22, and Murten was promoted to head coach — a position he still holds today.
“The shift was when Dean took over, he was able to fully give his attention, give his full time,” said Seumanutafa. “And then that's when we started to get [a] full coaching staff, and then we added a couple other managers [and] assistant coaches and that really helped the program.”
“People put money in, they want better results. And obviously better results need even more work and time and commitment [that] goes into it,” said Murten. “And that's what I've been able to do.”
The rise
After Murten took over, he focused on instilling principles of accountability and a strong work ethic. Coming from an military background of 24 years, he also wants his team to have clarity.
“I want the players to understand what they need to do, and I want them to be able to measure it honestly,” said Murten.
“I credit him so much for our success,” Smith said. “I think what he brings — the passion he has and that culture he really has from his past life experiences — really makes us a strong team.”
Smith recalled talking to Murten during her recruitment process and how he focused on the team’s developmental culture instead of their win/loss record.
“He started to recruit very like-minded people who really just wanted to work hard and strive to be the best and really take in that underdog mentality,” she said.
For Murten, this was because talent and rugby skills can be taught, but coachability and the drive to become better can’t — the latter of which can sometimes determine the outcome of a game.
“When we're on the field, I just want people who are going to work harder than that in front of them — that being the opposition,” said Murten. “If you're willing to do that, rugby can be a really simple game.”
Murten demands physically from his athletes, telling them they should be “going out and dying for each other.”
“To other sports that might seem very extreme, but for rugby culture and our team, that's what it's all about,” said Smith.
The team culture also includes fostering a tight community. According to Seumanutafa, the culture of the team before Murten was similar, and was enveloped into the culture moving forward.
“Part of our team culture was just continuing to be really connected and close on-field and off-field. And that's something that we always have as I became older on the team,” she said.
In Murten’s first season, the team ended with CW bronze and a 3–4 overall record. Although still losing, it was a vast improvement from the 2017 record of 1–5. Coming into the 2019 season, the team didn’t look much different, but having Murten at the helm of the program finally resulted in a winning record — albeit not a large one at 3–2 during the regular season.
The team rallied during the CW playoffs and snuck through to the final, and therefore the U Sports national tournament, with a nail-biting 21–19 win over the University of Victoria Vikes.
“There was just so much emotion in that game after we won, like it felt like we had just won nationals or something. Everyone was running onto the field. We [were] all crying,” said Smith.
“Going into [the] Can West final, it was almost like the cherry on top.”
Facing the defending CW champs, the University of Calgary Dinos, wasn’t an easy game, but it was one that Seumanutafa will remember winning.
“It was my favourite, because that was obviously the first time in our history,” she said. “There was a lot of firsts for our team and I think, especially with that group of girls as well, we could just finally see all of our hard work pay off.”
The team looked to replicate their success in the 2020 season, however, the team never played due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite that, public health rules and restrictions in BC allowed the team to continue practicing.
“Sometimes what goes missing is the ability to focus on the core skills of the game,” said Murten. “With us not having games, we could just spend the entire season focusing on core skills and really upskilling the athletes, and that's what we did.”
The team benefited greatly from this extra developmental time and Murten called it “a turning point” in the program. Plus, since the season was cancelled in full, no player was charged a year of eligibility — and therefore, they could each play one more season than they originally thought they would.
In 2021, 17 players returned from the 2019 team and improved to a 5–0 CW record. They returned to the playoffs and beat the Dinos 22–12 before dominating the Vikes 47–13 for their second title.
The next year, only two players from the 2019 team graduated. Earning their third consecutive banner seemed an easy feat as the Thunderbirds played with back line speed and forward unit physicality for a 4–0–1 regular season record, and 64–12 and 24–12 defeats over the Pandas and Vikes respectively in the playoffs.
In 2023, the 2019-returning numbers dropped to 10 but the team maintained their winning ways, ending the season once again atop the CW standings. They stood out with offensive prowess and a dominant back-line that scored 48 tries over 7 games, including flyhalf Savannah Bauder earning all of the points in the CW final.
This season, the Thunderbirds have four players who have played in all of the team’s CW championships. The seniority and experience of these athletes continues to shape the team’s culture and expectations.
“Something that we always talked about [was] … it's the same teams every year, essentially,” said Seumanutafa. “Especially as an older player, you start to know how those teams play.”
Teams are consistent — the Vikes, regardless of year, are strong defensively. The University of Lethbridge Pronghorns play a fairly back-heavy scoring game, while the University of Calgary Dinos have rarely scored over 35 points per game.
For the past four CW finals, the Thunderbirds have played the Vikes. And although they have won every year, Smith said the feeling never gets old.
“It's always so special,” she said. “It's always like a goal to be on top at Can West, especially when you're playing against a great rival school in the final.”
The T-Birds’ dominance wasn’t just in winning — but in winning by large margins too.
Over the course of their five championship seasons, they’ve averaged 5.62 times more points than their opponents. In the 2023/24 season, the ‘Birds averaged 14.6 point differential and held teams to zero points in four separate games.
This didn’t go unnoticed by other teams or the conference. In the last five years, Murten has been named the CW Coach of the Year four consecutive times (from 2019–23) and the Thunderbirds produced every single CW Player of the Year, along with two Rookies of the Year, since 2019.
The ‘curse’
Despite a string of successes at the CW level, the Thunderbirds seem to suffer the same fate every year: losing the first game of the U Sports national tournament. They have never placed higher than fifth, despite sometimes being ranked higher nationally upon entering the tournament.
On paper, something is screaming at you, ‘How could this happen?’
But when you delve a little deeper, there are a lot of factors playing into the pattern. For example, Smith recalled how in 2019, the team was the last to arrive and Murten was “freaking out.”
“Our team — our program — had never been to nationals before,” she said. “We had no idea what to expect.”
Although the team always wants to win the banner, for Smith, it is a lot to expect the program to exponentially succeed to the highest level.
“That's a huge step,” said Smith. “I think when you put it into perspective, it's like a drop in the bucket of the history that this program is going to make.”
Seumanutafa agreed, stating how the jump from conference to nationals is a big difference. You know your conference teams, but you can’t keep up with the entire country.
“And then when you went to nationals, you don't necessarily know any of those teams — don't know how they play[ed] that year,” said Seumanutafa. “It's the difference.”
The CW conference was originally the strongest conference, winning 8 banners in the first 12 seasons (Alberta from 1999–2003 and Lethbridge from 2007–09). Alberta earned another championship in 2013, but since then it has been one of the other conferences that takes the cake — most notably St. Francis Xavier University from Nova Scotia and Université Laval in Quebec.
But Murten doesn’t think the shift away from CW dominance at the national level is necessarily a product of an uncompetitive conference or a lack of West Coast talent.
“I wouldn't say that the teams are way better than ours. I would just say there's things like the travel, the environment. Some of our top players didn't perform to the best of their ability,” said Murten. “I think to win championships, you need everybody playing at the best.”
The Thunderbirds often had difficult hands drawn in the seedings as well. In three of the four years they’ve been to nationals — 2019, 2021, 2023 — their first game has been against the team who goes on to win the championship banner.
In 2019, they played Laval. Laval won the championship. In 2021, they played the hosts, Queen’s University. Queen’s won the championship. In 2023, they played Laval. Laval won the championship.
“We talked about [how] it shouldn't matter how they play. It should matter how we play. And if we're at our best, we should be beating every team,” said Seumanutafa.
“I think most of the time we do it ourselves,” she said. “We put too much pressure on ourselves to get in our heads, especially with that first game.”
However, the team has improved even within their pattern of losing that first game. In 2019, they lost to Laval by 20 points but the last two years have been losses determined by one or two points. Although it’s the same win/loss ratio, a single conversion lost them the game instead of three tries.
“It does look bad when you look back every year, and every year we've lost in the same stage, but every single scenario was a different story and a different reason,” said Smith. “[But] all of those things add up to one big overall learning that the program will take with it for every year to come.”
The team has also improved on bouncing back from that first loss. During their first nationals, they lost every game and ended in eighth place, losing with a point differential of -1.61. But by 2023, they had placed fifth for the third year in a row, and this time with a point differential of 4.25.
But Smith is still aware of the team’s apparent pitfalls at the tournament and stressed it will take time and team development to work up to a national title.
“I still think we're in the learning process of building up what [success] looks like for us and what builds that success for us,” said Smith. “Because maybe our hard work and grit always gets us that Can West banner. But what do we need extra to get us that national one?”
“I think we just have to find that still.”
The future
A sports dynasty rarely has a definitive time span, and is instead typically based on accomplishments. But even with five consecutive CW banners, Murten was hesitant to call his program one yet.
“For me, the most important thing is you don't want to win it for four or five years, and then drop down,” said Murten. “I think it's about longevity and development.”
The development aspect of the women’s rugby team is a larger part of the program that has helped — and will continue to help — the team’s success through giving more players opportunities to play Thunderbirds rugby, even if not at the varsity level.
The team now has a varsity team and two junior varsity teams, according to Murten, along with a club union pathway. This has allowed the program to accommodate upward of 70 players, rather than just one roster size of 25.
Seumanutafa said Murten had focused on the developmental side of the team since the beginning of his tenure.
“He really fought for us to get good facilities, [a] proper training kit and he really wanted our team to be almost like a professional environment,” she said. “A lot goes out to him and the coaches now that continue to try and build it into that type of high training environment.”
Both Murten and Smith said the team created a cycle of becoming better and attracting more and higher calibre players, which in turn makes the team better and win more. Murten specifically mentioned the four Olympian players — Piper Logan, Florence Symonds, Charity Williams and Shalaya Valenzuela — that the program has developed or recruited as markers of the program’s growth.
But in order to call it a dynasty, Murten said they need more time.
“My measure would be, where do we end up in another three or four years?” said Murten. “I'm happy where we are, but there's still a huge amount of work to do.”
“I want us to be looking higher at national championships.”
Murten also said much of the developmental program was made possible by funding not from the university, but from other sources.
“Sometimes we forget that all these things don't happen without support of sponsors and donors,” he said. “It costs a huge amount of money to have what I would call a development system.”
Murten said he spends about 70 per cent of his time looking after sponsors and trying to raise money in order to keep the development system running.
As for this year’s U Sports Championship in Charlottetown, PEI, Smith is hopeful about the team’s chances.
“I think we've really built a bigger depth in our bench where we might have not as had in the past couple years,” she said. “When those first-years are coming onto the field, I have full confidence in them that they can do the job. So I would say that's a bit different this year than past years.”
The Thunderbirds are seeded second and are facing the University of PEI Panthers when the tournament opens on October 30. For Murten, Smith and the rest of the team, it marks the start of what could be history in the making if they come back with a national title.
“I definitely think our program deserves it because we work so hard and [have] come so far,” said Smith.
Share this article
First online
Submit a complaint Report a correction
