My Story: Shaunagh Brown
You're an international athlete competing globally. You quit your sport and try rugby. Two years later you're a Red Rose.
In between that you have managed to make your boxing debut, become a fire fighter and a commercial diver. Now you are one in the group of the first full-time professional women’s rugby players in the world. We sat down to hear from the incredible life journey Shaunagh Brown has been on so far.
“It was at the age of 25, I thought ‘let’s have a go at rugby.’”
Harlequins Women prop Shaunagh Brown is not one for taking a traditional route. Having represented England in the hammer throw at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, where she finished 11th, she decided she was done with her career in athletics, having focused on the sport since the age of 12.
The 29-year-old initially thought she would try out what she perceived as a traditional lifestyle but this did not last long.
“I thought I’d be a normal person who goes home after work and sits and watches TV - that lasted about two weeks as I just got bored at home.
“I literally just phoned up my local rugby club at Medway RFC and asked them what days and times they trained, and went down there for my first session.
“I remember one of the activities was handstand push-ups and wrestling, just being aggressive and I thought ‘this is great, this is actively being encouraged’, so it got me hooked from the first session to be honest.”
Having not come for a sporting family, and not even engaged with the Six Nations or Rugby World Cups when growing up, Brown took encouragement from her athletics coach since the age of 14 John Hillier. While focused on athletics most of the week, for John Saturday’s were for rugby.
Brown, who has the ability to play in the back-row and prop, did however, get the benefits of growing up in a family with a number of male cousins.
“It wasn’t me versus the boys,” she continued. “It was just that we were all playing together and to keep up with them I had to be better than them, and it was almost irrelevant that I was a little girl.”
From her first steps at Medway, Brown played XVs rugby for the first time in December 2015. Although fully admitting it took her a number of months to get her head around the laws of the game, it was watching the Red Roses in the 2016 Women’s Six Nations that first gave her the inkling she could play international rugby.
“I think these things in my head and they’re always a great idea in there, and then you say them out loud and you think that it is a bit unrealistic.
“I used to say to people I want to play for England, and some were ‘okay, yeah’ but a couple of people were like ‘well what are you going to do about it?’”
As well as a stint in boxing, under the name Shaunagh ‘The Hammer Brown’, and time as a British Gas engineer, Brown re-trained as a commercial diver before ending up at Kent Fire and Rescue where she was working when she first got a call-up for England.
In fact for her first cap against Canada in 2017 she had to get permission from the service, where she came through a selection process of 5,000 to make it into the 24 selected, to be able to join up with the squad to train.
“It’s a bit of a whirlwind and it just sums up my life really – I don’t even like to take out a two-year phone contract because I don’t know what I’ll be doing in two years or if I’ll be in the country.
“My life just changes constantly and I just embrace it all of the time and take up the challenges. I always like to do different things, new things and test myself.”
It shows something about the mindset of the driven nature of the Harlequin as to why she wanted to join the force in the first place.
“Firefighting was always something I wanted to do growing up as a little girl,” she added.
“It was the not knowing what each day brings and the uncertainty, the different challenges, working with different people in your own team and then members of the public.
“It is ultimately I want to be a hero, a little super hero – I love Marvel, I love Avengers so in a way I can be my own little super hero. In my head, I don’t say that out loud too often.”
From taking up rugby in 2015, Brown’s career has been on an upward trajectory in the sport.
Moving from Medway to Harlequins in 2016 she played every game that season as the club won the title. A year later she became a Red Rose and at the start of this year she was named as one of 28-players in the first ever full-time professional squad. Three months later she was a Grand Slam winner at Twickenham Stadium.
Asked about what it was like to make an England debut in a second sport, Brown responded with a smile: “It definitely was as special.
“It’s a whole different sport, a whole different challenge. Growing up it was all athletics and I wouldn’t have dreamt of playing rugby for England.
“One of favourite my comments came from my mum when I finally got my shirt framed and I was trying to decide about what to put on the plaque. I was saying things like first cap or first international and my mum’s going ‘well it’s not your first cap as you’ve competed for your country in athletics over 20 times, so you have to say something about rugby.’”
As a full-time athlete, Brown is required to focus on rest as well as training, something you sense that she struggles with at times given her natural instinct to look to the next challenge.
However, it has given her one particular weekend benefit which she can look forward to.
“Now I’ve usually got Sundays free, I take my nephew to a local rugby club. I think that’s pretty restful just going and watching, being a rugby auntie and clapping away.
“Although, I still find myself trying to give him tips and techniques but I’ve got to just let him play around.”
Article first published on 9 November 2019
