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GET INTO RUGBY IN 2016ABOVEBrittany Benn helps Canada to the Olympic bronze medalon a World Rugby match commissioner course in July were women. Elsewhere, USA Rugby launched a Spanish language training and education course and the Leading Rugby workshop was held in Miami in July, with 25 participants representing 16 countries.Excluding the USA, there were a total of 144,700 GIR participants in the last 12 months, and none were more excited than the youngsters of St Vincent and the Grenadines who got to see the Webb Ellis Cup at first hand after their country’s game against Jamaica was chosen to begin the Rugby World Cup 2019 qualification process in March.As inclusion and diversity have been two key areas of focus for Rugby Americas North (RAN), the end-of-year Get Into Rugby (GIR) figures make for particularly encouraging reading. With Anguilla now fully on board, World Rugby’s mass participation programme was active in 17 different countries throughout the region in 2016 and the percentage of girls taking part (46 per cent) was higher than in any other regional association. Naturally, it helps if these youngsters have role models to aspire to such as the Canadian women’s team, who put aside the disappointment of an early exit in their home tournament of Langford to finish third overall on the HSBC World Rugby Women’s Sevens Series, before claiming the Olympic bronze medal at Rio 2016. Later in the year, Canada had more cause for celebration with victories over Guyana and Jamaica in the men’s and women’s finals at the RAN Sevens in Trinidad and Tobago. Victory in the RAN U19 15s rounded off a memorable year for Mexico, whose men’s senior team moved into the top 50 of the World Rugby Rankings for the first time after a 32-3 victory over Guyana in the RAN Championship final.Always striving to encourage the development of the game in whatever form, RAN organised the first-ever regional women’s 10s tournament, which was won by USA South and featured teams from Jamaica, Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago.In conjunction with the HSBC World Rugby Women’s Sevens Series tournament in Atlanta, RAN held an elite rugby sevens coaching workshop for female coaches from six countries (Mexico, Jamaica, Haiti, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and Cayman Islands), while four of the eight participants Growth in women’s rugby is cause for celebration in a region that had the honour of kicking off the road to Rugby World Cup 2019.PROMOTING INCLUSION AND DIVERSITY ACROSS THE REGIONwww.rugbyamericasnorth.comtwitter: @RugbyAmericasN 17countries 144,700participants 46%female participationYEAR IN REVIEW 2016 WORLD RUGBY 53AROUND THE REGIONS | PARTICIPATE