These 223 schools harnessed talent for the NRLW. One became a juggernaut

Nestled in the heart of the Gold Coast, one school has become a powerhouse of women’s rugby league talent production – a juggernaut boasting more NRLW graduates than any other institution in the country.

Before the female game received its first national competition in 2018, Keebra Park had built a girls’ sporting excellence academy.

Just last year, on the back of the surging popularity of the code, they forged a separate rugby league excellence program, featuring three weekly on-field or gym training sessions, and a classroom session geared towards developing skills for budding athletes to handle the rigours of professional sport.

Among the mentors for the near 200-strong academy are former rugby sevens and NRLW star Niall Williams Guthrie, brother to cross-code athlete Sonny Bill Williams.

“It’s very much an aspirational sporting pathway, and we’re trying to make sure they’re prepared for that – making sure they’re resilient and have all their life skills outside of footy,” program head James Chapman says.

“We want to develop them for the rigours of professional sporting life, but I think the overall lessons of the program are we want to make sure they have a positive experience with rugby league, and want to be a steward of the game and play footy beyond just high school.”

Of the 355 players currently named on each NRLW squad’s roster, 19 hail from Keebra Park. Only two other schools – Marsden State High School (12) in Logan and The Hills Sports High School (12) in Seven Hills, Sydney – enter the double digits for NRLW graduates, with academy pathways still developing as the code continues to grow.

When asked what had made the program so successful, Chapman says: “It all comes back to the coaching staff. We have an awesome coaching team, collectively, who give up so much time and genuinely do care about the girls.

“Yes, winning is great, and it’d be great to bring back some trophies every year, but I think the level of care they have for the girls and the drive they have to see them improve every day is probably unmatched anywhere in Australia, I’d reckon.”

Several former students have become future leaders of the competition, including Raftstrand-Smith sisters Tiana and Ebony of the North Queensland Cowboys – the former representing the Maroons twice.

“Because rugby league was still so new at the time, the girls who separated themselves from the others really liked the contact element – that was Tiana. If you’ve seen any of her games, particularly early on, she loved the physical element,” Chapman says.

“A lot of the girls early on were transferring from touch football – highly transferable skills – but just developing confidence in contact has been an evolution in itself. We’re at the point now you could ask a 12-year-old girl ‘how long have you been playing footy?’ and she could say five or six years.

There are 223 schools represented in the NRLW this season, including 172 with one representative.

Among those is Miami State High School, where rugby sevens star Teagan Levi was educated. On secondment from Rugby Australia, Levi has gone on to ignite the Titans’ premiership prospects.