The 1991 Women’s Rugby World Cup came down to a face-off between the brash but underdog Americans and the established England team, the product of a long British tradition in the sport.
But it was the United States team that won the final, in Cardiff Arms Park in Wales, capturing what came to be considered the first major world championship ever played in women’s rugby.
No. 8 for the Americans, handling an important position in the middle of the field.
Flores was a key figure in shaping American rugby history during her 40-year tenure. She captained the USA Women’s Rugby Team in 1987 and coached the same team from 2003 to 2010, returning with it to the women’s rugby World Cup in 2006 and 2010. And from 2014 until Oct. 21, when she died of colon cancer at 66 in Providence, R.I., she was the coach of Brown University’s Division I women’s rugby team. The J.F. Skeffington Funeral Home in Providence reported her passing in an obituary.
Flores’s legacy as a coach was one of inclusion. She pushed for more support for women’s rugby, telling The Associated Press in 2010 that “women have always wanted to be physical, but they haven’t had the opportunity.”
She was also the coach of the San Francisco Fog LGBTQ rugby team. Later, she played for and coached Berkeley All Blues, a semi-professional Bay Area team that won 11 league championships (1994 to 2010).
“I love the sport, and I want to expose as many people to it as I can, particularly young women,” Flores told The Bay Area Reporter in 2013. “It’s important for their confidence and self-esteem.”
“With college girls, after playing rugby, they start thinking better of themselves and realize what they can do better,” she said. “You see them walk into interviews differently. I have seen the same things working with gay men. After playing a little bit of sports, there’s a whole change in how they see themselves, kind of like a flower blooming.”
Flores was often paid a pittance for coaching rugby and played a lot of rugby herself. She also recalls that many of the players who represented the 1991 national team were employed to support their families and lost their jobs when they went to compete.
Women’s rugby at the national level has historically been underfunded and under-promoted in comparison with the men’s game, she said in a 2011 interview with the blog Rugby Wrap Up.
When asked about her desire for World Cup coaching, she stated that she was unsure because of the insufficient funding. “It’s lip service to say the women get support when our Eagles have to do raffles and sell last World Cup’s gear to raise money,” she said. “Next it will be bake sales. Are the men are doing this too?”
Women’s rugby has long had to fend for itself. The 1991 World Cup was organized not by the International Rugby Board, the sport’s governing body, but by four players from the Richmond Women’s Rugby Club in Britain. They wrote to national rugby teams, booked fields and raised funds to cover costs.
The Rugby Board, now called World Rugby, acknowledged the legitimacy of the tournament in 2009, when, in a news release, it listed the U.S. Women’s National Team as 1991 champions.
Flores stated in a BBC interview that the Americans won the 1991 final game 19-6. This was before 3,000 people whose mere presence was nerve-racking. “Just, you know, having people watching us was something different,” she said.
The game was a triumph for athletic prowess over the long-standing experience of European rugby teams. “They obviously may have understood the strategy of the game a bit better than we did having grown up with it,” Flores told scrumhalfconnection.com, a women’s rugby website, “but our fitness and mobility between our fast backs and forwards outlasted them.”
But she said that American rugby officials had failed to capitalize on the team’s success. “They didn’t really promote it as you could have,” she said.
Kathleen Theresa Flores was the daughter of Catharine (Miles), and Joseph Flores. She was born in Philadelphia on February 7, 1955. She graduated from Monmouth Regional High School in New Jersey and attended East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, earning a bachelor’s degree in physical education.
She went on to Florida State University for a master’s degree in exercise physiology and began playing rugby there at 23. (Information regarding her survivors was unavailable.)
Zyana Thomas, a senior at Brown and a women’s rugby player who wears No. Flores said that Flores supported players of color, as Flores did. Flores provided a place for Thomas to stay when she was homeless in college, she stated.
Last year, the position of women’s rugby coach at Brown, through a donation, was endowed in her name.
Source: NY Times