BY SEÁN HOLLAND
NOT only did Niamh Hilliard and Elva McAuley enjoy an unheralded year in the club scene winning league and cup titles with the Clonakilty U16s and going the whole year unbeaten, but they also played an integral part in claiming the Munster Schools’ Junior Cup for their school.
The Sacred Heart Secondary School won the title after a 19-0 win over Coláiste Pobail Bheanntraí in March. Captain Hilliard and player of the match McAuley still remember that famous day in Virgin Media Park, and are already looking forward to stepping up to the senior ranks.
‘We always say it's our favourite team that we've played with. We're so excited again for the senior grade, so we all can come up again together. All the girls are so closely knit, it’s brilliant,’ Hillard said at the school’s awards ceremony that honoured its sensational success this season.
McAuley explained the feelings she and her teammates had going into that final.
‘We were a bit nervous at the start because the crowds were crazy. Like Bantry, they had drums and everything. Our school were a bit late arriving so when they came, we were warming up, and they were all I could hear and that was making me even more nervous. The chants and songs were crazy loud and it really hyped me up,’ McAuley recalled.
‘Then when the match started, you could just feel the atmosphere. I was pumped and you could feel the adrenaline going and it was exciting to be playing. I was just really glad to be there.’
Hilliard, from a family steeped in the sport, was influenced to pick up a rugby ball from a very young age and she along with her friends have helped kickstart the rugby boom in Clon.
‘I started when I was six. My brother Conor was playing through my whole childhood, and my dad Mark was coaching as well, so I'd have been playing with the boys before we had a girls’ team,’ Hilliard explained.
‘There were about five or six girls playing with the boys’ side and we really wanted the girls’ team. So we were saying “please can we make a girls’ team?”. It kind of all came from us really pushing for it, and now the girls’ squads in Clon are so big. It's such an achievement,’ Hilliard exclaimed.
McAuley was a bit later to the party but once introduced to the sport in first year, it wasn’t long before the TY student caught the rugby bug. She scored two of the Sacred Heart’s three tries in the final, with Hilliard getting the third.
‘It was amazing,’ she said of her try-scoring heroics. ‘We kind of went through the whole movement and we had been going through drills in training trying to get that move perfected. And when it actually worked out, it was just so good. It was the first try, so the crowd were going crazy.’
