A few weeks later, the Bristol Bears player was on the end of another phone call – but this time had reason to celebrate: she was offered the chance to become one of Wales’ first ever professional female rugby players. “I was literally just about to teach some year eights,” recalls John. “I was like, ‘Oh, can I phone you back?’ I’m a Welsh-speaking physics teacher – we’re basically gold dust and the school didn’t want to let me go – but after being offered the contract my heart was already gone.”
Also gone were the long days of round-the-clock lesson planning, the mountain of GCSE marking that awaited her after training and the four-hour commutes to Bristol that she would make four times a week from her home in Swansea.
In many ways, John’s journey in the sport is reflective of the wider recognition that the women’s game is now gaining. Growing up in her family’s pub in Handy Cross, Carmarthenshire, she was used to the regular drinkers “not knowing women’s rugby was a thing.” It was only after John won her first cap for Wales in 2018 that their attitudes towards the women’s game mellowed. “My mum paraded me through the pub and literally everyone was clapping,” smiles John. “All of the regulars suddenly kind of flipped the switch.”
It was strikingly different from the bleak set of circumstances John would find herself this time last year, when she was part of Wales’ winless Six Nations campaign. The team’s landslide defeats triggered a wave of criticism towards the WRU and its underinvestment in its women’s team. For John, the negativity was impossible to escape.
“I remember sitting down with my mum after we’d lost Scotland and I was like, ‘Why do I do this? Why do I put myself through this like why do I stretch myself in every direction?’ At the time, it felt like no one cared,” she recalls.
But now, the tide has turned. John is one of 12 full-time players currently being funded by the union, with a further 15 on part time deals. It still falls massively short of being able to challenge England for the Six Nations title, although it is a step in the right direction.
