Mexico captures bronze in first women’s worlds appearance

Photo credit: Geoff White (gw-images)

By Ameeta Vohra

Friday June 30 was a historic day for two national football programs at the 2017 IFAF Women’s World Championships in Langley, British Columbia.

The bronze medal game featured two nations making their women’s tournament debuts. Mexico came out on top 19-8 over Great Britain.

Scoring summary

Winning the first bronze medal in their national football program’s history was a major accomplishment for Mexico.  However, the expectations are now much higher for the team once they head back home.

“For us our main goal was to be in the bronze medal game,” commented Mexico Head Coach Jovanni Carrillo Larios.  “We worked very hard to achieve this medal.”

“Finally, we achieved our goal.  So, we have a very big responsibility when we get back to Mexico and in order to improve and make this program stronger.”

Some of those improvements are to play different structures of tackle football.

“The Mexico players saw the level of play from United States, Canada and Europe,” added Carrillo Larios.  “In order to improve our program in Mexico, we play arena football for Mexico 7 on 7.”

“In this competition, it is 11 (on-11) football.  We need to improve that to make a bit of ground in order to improve and make it stronger.”

While Great Britain had hoped for a better outcome, the team applauded Mexico on making history in their national program on Friday.

“I congratulate them because there’s a new women’s program that’s going to be competing in the future and it’s great to see the further growth of the sport,” said Great Britain Head Coach Jim Messenger.

Despite the loss, Great Britain took away many positives from Friday’s game which included achieving goals.

“Our first thing was to actually get here so we are proud that we actually achieved that,” Messenger said.  “Our goal was to win one game; I have to say if it was one game we had to win, we wanted to win against Finland because they beat us in the European Championship.”

“To a certain extent, we achieved our aim after game 1.  Then, it was how far could we push ourselves as far as we can.  Getting the opportunity to play for the bronze medal was a tremendous opportunity.”

Already, Great Britain is motivated to improve for the next Championship.

“We will be back and we will try again,” added Messenger.  “We know that we need to get better but we have learned so much from being a part of it and the qualities of the other nations, their ability of football and we need to get better as a nation.”

“We are very much looking forward to that challenge ahead and continue to take part in this celebration of women’s sport.”

By having two first-time entries succeed beyond expectations in this tournament, Great Britain hopes it will inspire nations to build their own programs.

“It’s a very exciting, exciting future for us to take back home the experience of actually having been here four years from watching it the last time to actually competing here has been an amazing experience,” expressed Messenger.  “We hope that other nations from around the world will look at this an say it is possible to build quickly as Mexico did compete at a very high level.”

This post is also available in: French