Members of Harvard's women's rugby team celebrate winning the 2025 NCAA Division I championship.Supplied
Although Canada’s defeat in the Women’s Rugby World Cup final two months ago brought the game to the forefront of the national sporting psyche, as a quadrennial event, going one better requires some liberal reserves of patience, among other qualities.
In the meantime, signs that Canada’s rugby renaissance might hold firm can be found in the U.S. college system, where a quartet of Canadian talent helped spur Harvard University to the first three-peat in the history of NCAA Division I women’s rugby over the weekend, as well as its record fourth title.
In Cambridge, Mass., Ava Ference, Sophie Hayes, Victoria Stanley and Gemma Ogoke all featured in the squad that edged Missouri’s Lindenwood University 22-19 to cap an undefeated season. All four players are part of Rugby Canada’s development program.
Hayes, from Victoria, scored the Crimson’s second try in the final, while Ference, from Cobble Hill, B.C., converted two of the tries. The fact that both etched their name on the scoresheet in the same game seemed serendipitous, as both had played rugby at the Shawnigan Lake School in B.C., with Ference – who is two years above Hayes – acting as her mentor when she arrived at the boarding school.
Hayes certainly credits Ference for helping introduce her to Harvard, and showing what kind of achievements are possible on the rugby pitch.
Sophie Hayes of Victoria competing in the NCAA Division I women's rugby championship. Harvard won its third consecutive championship on Saturday.Supplied
“Especially for women in sports, something like Harvard and big schools and big achievements like this feels kind of unreal until someone in front of you does it,” Hayes said.
“I’m definitely very grateful to her, and very inspired by her for really paving the way for myself and hopefully many more girls to come.”
Role models feature heavily in both women’s pathways to Harvard. Ference, a third-year scrum-half who has gone 25-1-1 in NCAA 15s play, grew up playing hockey and figure skating.
She didn’t find her way to rugby until the sixth grade, when she turned on the TV to watch the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics and saw the Canadian sevens team – which ultimately won bronze – lighting up the competition.
“That was kind of the first time I’d ever really seen rugby, to be completely honest,” Ference said. “So I was watching this, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, pardon my language, these girls are badass.’ It was the coolest thing ever.”
Hayes was already playing rugby when she met one of her idols, current Canadian star Sophie de Goede, who was recently named World Rugby player of the year following the Rugby World Cup.
Both Hayes and de Goede have played for the Castaway Wanderers rugby club in Victoria. While de Goede was rehabbing her injured knee ahead of the World Cup, the Canadian star, who plays lock or No. 8, came by the club to present jerseys to players.
Though Hayes, who plays hooker, and de Goede play different positions, the interaction helped light a fire for someone who would soon be chasing her dreams at Harvard.
“I think having such a similar story to her has been huge for me, and it’s just really about the representation,” said Hayes, who added that de Goede went to high school about two blocks away from her home.
Harvard's Ava Ference has gone 25-1-1 through three years with the school's rugby program.Edward Monigan IV/Supplied
Ference’s early brush with athletic greatness was closer still. Her father, Andrew, was a long-time NHL player who won the Stanley Cup with the Boston Bruins in 2011, and eventually captained the Edmonton Oilers in the city where Ava was born. And her mother, Krista Bradford, was a former professional snowboarder.
Ava says her dad has become completely obsessed by the sport of rugby, joining the board of directors at BC Rugby and even playing recreationally from time to time. But Ference says there was never any pressure from her father to pick hockey.
“Oh my God, he loves rugby,” she said. “He’s one of our biggest fans. He obviously likes hockey, hockey was his sport. But growing up, obviously I played hockey, but there was really no pressure to continue with it. I mean, he just wanted me to do what I loved, and that ended up being rugby.”
But bloodlines are bloodlines, and being tough is being tough. Though Andrew Ference missed this year’s NCAA rugby final – he was there last year – he’s flying in to be with his daughter this week as she has surgery on a torn labrum – an injury she played through in last weekend’s final.
As for whether her father is proud to hear his daughter play through the pain, the kind of injury Andrew Ference likely did many a time during his own 16-year playing career, his daughter says he was kind of torn.
“He has a love-hate relationship with my choice,” she said. “As a father and an athlete, he has differing views.”