Well Deserved Award for Inspirational Zainab
Barnes RFC’s Zainab Alema has become the Sunday Times Grassroots Sportswoman of the Year 2020.
A much loved Barnes teammate, wife and mother of three children aged four, three and one, she is also on the NHS frontline as an intensive care neonatal nurse at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital. The founder of rugby charity Studs In The Mud, she has been recognised in the awards for encouraging black and Muslim women and girls to play rugby.
Affectionately known as Zee, Zainab has had an inspirational impact on female players across the UK as well as in Ghana and Morocco. Her passion for playing has seen Studs In The Mud providing equipment and funding to allow women to play where rugby is not freely on offer and she continues to use her social media presence as a platform for encouraging more women to join the game.
“Zainab is truly inspiring and we wish her the very best with all her future endeavours and congratulate her for the fantastic impact she is having in growing our sport,” said Barnes President, David Doonan.
The award has seen Zainab and her whole family celebrating. “I got a call from my team mate Sarah Bosworth after the school run one day and she told me she had nominated me and I’d been shortlisted,” says Zainab. “It took a while to sink in that they wanted to interview me. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone but when I did tell my family I’d won everyone was screaming.
“My husband Abu is loving it. We got married when I was 21 and I told him I was into rugby and ‘if you are marrying me you are marrying rugby!’ He supports me so much, looks after the kids and shares everything on his social media. During the first lockdown I was missing rugby a lot and asked if I could use him as a tackling bag, after a couple of weeks he decided it hurt too much!
“My mum has seen me play but didn’t like it when I got a split lip, she’s really proud though and so is my dad. He originally asked why I wanted to play an elitist men’s sport but now he’s super proud.
Trailblazer
Her first rugby experience was aged 14 in Chiswick school PE lessons, she loved it and her PE teacher Meg Macaulay told her to stick with it. Then, while doing A Levels aged 17, her teacher Paula Middleton seeing her potential got the school to sponsor Zainab for a season and encouraged her to go to training at Ealing Trailfinders. It wasn’t easy as, unlike team mates who got dropped off by parents, she had to make the journey on public transport, walking alone down dark streets.
But Zainab wasn’t put off, in her hijab, rugby ball in her hand, she didn’t fit the African Muslim stereotypes but she has delighted in smashing them.
While studying to be a neonatal nurse at university, the student environment saw much of the socialising involve alcohol. Often named woman of the match, she had to nominate a team mate to drink a pint and found it awkward.
"People say, you can just sit down and have a coke, which I do now, but uni is a bit different,” she says.
When she started nursing and needed an escape from the inevitable stress of the job, she looked for a new rugby club and joined Millwall. There, thanks to a move where at No 8 she picked up the ball at the back of a scrum and ran at the opposition 10, she earned the nickname Bulldozer. Smashing and demolishing stereotypes as well as the opposition was something Zainab took in her stride and defined her philosophy on life as a career woman, wife, mother and rugby player.
Zainab currently plays at Barnes Rugby Club where she feels very much at home and says “We had another black woman join us because of me, and that's brilliant."
With her heroes England’s World Cup winner Maggie Alphonsi and current star Shaunagh Brown, Zainab’s toast of choice is Earl Grey tea and what she’s drinking to is “other people like me coming through, or thinking maybe I could try rugby, looking at me and saying you know what, I can do it. I would love to see a Muslim woman playing for England and more black women taking up the sport."
Studs In The Mud uses rugby to help change people's lives for the better, shipping out kit around the world particularly for women and children to be able to play. Zainab also has a project aiming to encourage more Muslim women to try rugby and become part of a truly diverse rugby community.
It would be hard to find a more deserving award winner than this remarkable woman.
