Ahead of the 2019 season, one of the Goulburn Dirty Reds' highest priorities was growing the status of women's rugby union in Goulburn.
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As the 2020 season looms, it's safe to say that the club has exceeded expectations, with three players selected in the Brumbies Super W squad.
Paige Penning, Pearl Rakete, and Sass Cudaj were all named by the Brumbies last week, and have spent recent weeks training ahead of the season opener on February 15 at GIO Stadium against Western Australia.
Along with those three, team co-coach, Ash Mewburn, was named among the Super W coaching staff.
Penning, who made the Brumbies side in 2019, said she and the rest of the Goulburn girls were "really excited".
"It was a goal of the team's and Ash's as well [to increase the profile of rugby union]," Penning said.
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"I'm happy to see that we've got this far so early on, it's one year that we've had a full team ... to have three of those players coming to Super W, we're really pleased."
Though Penning was in the Brumbies side during this year's Super W season, she did not get a huge amount of game time.
So despite her prior experience, she still felt the same excitement and nervousness as last year when she was selected for the squad.
"I didn't get a whole lot of game time last year, I only played about 16 minutes, and the structure of training's been changed a whole heap [which adds to the excitement]," she said.
Rakete and Cudaj, Penning said, thoroughly deserved their selections.
"Sass had been selected to play in AON Sevens, that's like the Brumbies equivalent for Sevens, so she'd been training the last three or four months, and that was good to be on the radar of all the coaches," she said.
"Pearl's had a bit of experience, she was in the Schoolgirl Brumbies, [but] she's been out with an ACL [anterior cruciate ligament] injury, and her first contact play back was in the trial.
"No surprises that she got in, she's very talented. Credit to her for doing so much at training and keeping up, it's not easy to come straight back from injury."
Four members of the Dirty Reds women's team being involved in Super W, Penning said, was a reflection of the impact of the team's motto.
"We're one team, one club, all together."
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