On the pitch at the Stade Dominique Duvauchelle in Créteil on Saturday 12th October, a diminutive woman with a black cap on her head doesn't miss a single bit of the match between Racing 92 and RC Toulon. That day, Sandrine Agricole is no longer the physiotherapist of the Var club. That day, she is the head coach.
it's an historic first in the Top 14. She is the one Pierre Mignoni has chosen to guide the Toulonnais on the pitch on match days. Voluntarily exiled to the stands for having lost his cool the previous week, former France scrum-half Mignoni is counting on Agricole to replace him on the touchline. She has gone from physiotherapist to coach in the blink of an eye. It's because of league regulations that the former international finds herself in this position: she is in fact the only person on the Toulon staff with the required coaching badges - in this instance, a second-degree BE2 - to be there.
As the physiotherapist, Agricole is used to passing on messages to the players - amongst whom she is very popular - on the pitch, but while Mignoni has banished himself to the stands, he is sending a constant stream of messages through to her via an earpiece.
Inspiration in Amsterdam
It is a real quirk of fate for someone who ended her playing career just a decade ago. A fly-half or centre for Stade Rennais and the French national team, it was in the Paris region that she discovered rugby when she was only 12 years old. In middle school, her sports teacher Mr Gilles introduced her to the sport. "Love at first sight," she would later say. She signed up with her little sister for her first club - they were the only two girls there. Agricole quickly took to training, but had to wait until she was 16 to play in an all-female contest.
Agricole discovered the elite game from the stands when she attended the third edition of the Women's Rugby World Cup in 1998 in Amsterdam when she was 18. “It wasn't an exotic place but I was able to discover that there was a French women's team and I will always remember during the anthems, I was watching the French team and I said to one of my friends, 'One day I will be down there with them'”, she recalled in 2021. That year wasn't to be France's, who finished the tournament in eighth place. But Agricole was convinced that she had a role to play in the future of the team. "That's where this desire to continue this rugby adventure at the highest level and to make all the sacrifices necessary to achieve this goal came from."
Three Grand Slams and a Bronze
The daughter of parents from the French-Caribbean island of Martinique won her first cap five years later from the bench in the 2003 Women's Six Nations. The game itself was no less than Le Crunch at Twickenham. Although France lost 57-0 in front of 2,000 fans, it wasn't enough to deter a player who would go on to gain 84 caps for her country.
At RC Toulon, where she landed in 2020, she is also the second-most capped international on the staff behind Sergio Parisse (142 caps). Mathieu Bastareaud has 54 and Baptiste Serin 46. She would add three grand slams to her list of achievements during the Six Nations Championships in 2004, 2005 and 2014. "We were at a level where women's rugby was starting to take hold. I'm not saying that the doors were wide open, the media weren't following us at the time but they were starting to listen to us, thanks to the results in particular," says Agricole. She also participated in the 2009 Rugby World Cup Sevens in Dubai, followed by two Rugby World Cups in 2010 (fourth in London) and 2014 in Marcoussis, where France finished with bronze.
Finishing her playing career, and a new adventure
"People realised that rugby played by women was not a brutal style of rugby [...] it was young women who were studying, young women who were sometimes mothers, married, and they also saw that there was a whole sacrifice, a whole lot of work around this construction of performance which led us to achieve a good result in the World Cup in 2014," she reflects.
Agricole was 34 years old when she decided to stop playing. She became a sports physiotherapist in a private practice. At the same time, she trained the women's backs at Stade Rennais, then a newly-established club. She didn't cut herself off from rugby and craved the atmosphere that she so missed, even if it was in the treatment room. She accepted an opportunity with the French Under-18 sevens team, whom she accompanied to the Youth Olympic Games in Argentina in 2018, before accepting Annick Hayraud's offer to join the French women's team set-up in 2019.
At the same time, she was a consultant at France Télévision, and worked as a physiotherapist at Stade Rennais and RC Vannes (then in Pro D2), before being convinced to go to Toulon in 2020. The pandemic came but she stayed put in Toulon. One season, then two, then three, then four. She took the opportunity to get back into the game for a few matches with the Rugby Club Toulon Provence Méditerranée in Women's Elite 2.
And today? She is more involved than ever with the RCT and, for a few games yet, acting head coach on match days.
