Touch rugby team Inverness Lynx to send trio to Glasgow to compete in Pride In Touch tournament featuring teams from all over the UK
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Three Inverness touch rugby players will be heading to Glasgow this weekend to compete in a tournament featuring teams from across the UK.
After previously holding tournaments in London and Manchester, Pride In Touch – a platform promoting LGBTQ+ inclusion in the sport – is coming north of the border for the first time this weekend.
That caught the attention of the Inverness Lynx, a group that meets up at the Bught every week throughout the summer to play.
Initially intending to send a full squad to Glasgow, the Lynx found that player availability became an issue when they realised it clashed with Belladrum festival.
Not to be deterred, three players – Fraser Craig, Hannah Chisholm and John Fitness – decided to go down regardless, and they will link up with the Newcastle Ravens to compete.
It promises to be a valuable, and for some long overdue, experience playing the often overlooked sport against teams from across the country.
“I looked Newcastle up to see how they were doing, and their Union team are absolutely drubbing teams, so I think they must be quite good,” Craig, who plays rugby union for Highland, said.
“Their touch squad goes to everything apparently, any sort of tournament there is.
“We were originally looking to enter a full squad, but it’s only the three of us who can make it and it just happened to be a Pride tournament.
“We will support everything, so it was just a case of saying ‘let’s do it’. It doesn’t matter where it is, what it is or who it is – if there’s a tournament we will go.
“John is gay, but that doesn’t really matter. I’ve played touch for five years, and I’ve never been to a tournament, so I really wanted to go because usually tournaments are in the middle of the rugby union season.
“I think it’s all inclusive teams, but I’m just going there to have fun and play some champagne rugby – and show that a prop can actually run.”
Chisholm added: “I think it will be a mix, it’s for everyone.
“I don’t really have any expectations because it’s the first one we’ve been to.”
Rory Baldwin, one of the Lynx’s longest-serving players, is not going down to Glasgow for the Pride In Touch tournament but knows how important gaining that competitive experience can be for anyone relatively new to the game.
“We try and encourage players to go to tournaments, because we don’t really get the opportunity much up here,” he said.
“We only have a couple of level one referees, so we can do what we can but the game makes a lot more sense when referees are properly enforcing the rules.
“The game can be quite hard to explain, especially if a lot of your team has played union before like ours.
“It’s easy to play a game that’s fun where everybody throws a ball around without really strictly enforcing all the rules. Sometimes the rules don’t always make sense to beginners, so it can be a bit of an eye-opener for some.
“Even in the tournaments we go to, it would probably be at beginner levels just because there’s such a cycle of players.
“I think we’re always going to be a bit of a social club. In the central belt they have league nights where eight or nine teams are playing matches, but that’s not really feasible here.
“It would be nice to get more than two teams for our summer league so that it’s an actual league, and less like a test series. That’s our goal.
“Most of the people here are happy to come and have a run about for a bit of fitness.”
Touch rugby, in many ways, is designed to be inclusive. It is written into the rules of the game that teams must consist of equal numbers of men and women – which can pose another problem for the Lynx, who tend to have more men than women coming along to sessions in Inverness – making it difficult to rotate squads at tournaments.
For John Fitness, the only gay player going to the Pride In Touch tournament from Inverness, it promises to be an exciting weekend.
“I’m gay, but that’s not our main reason for going down,” Fitness reasoned.
“We’re a friendly, competitive bunch, and it looked like a good tournament to go to.
“It’s good to have a group in Inverness that’s quite accepting and keen to go down, and nobody here has made me feel uncomfortable for being gay, it’s a lovely group of people and that’s just part and parcel of it.
“I think for a lot of people the fear is worse than the reality. I say that to a lot of people.
“In the gay community, in my experience, the fear and the mindset of what you’re going to experience is more often than not actually not the reality.
“There’s a stereotype that gay people can’t be or aren’t in sport, so having events like this is good.
“It’s a mix of everyone. It’s not just going to be LGBT+ players and clubs, it’s a mix, and everyone mingling together is going to be a really positive thing.
“It’s happened in London and Manchester before, so to have it coming to Scotland is really good.”
