The East Region’s girls’ team will be making a small piece of rugby history, it was announced today. The region’s U18 squad will be taking part in the first overseas tour by an English region, and the first visit by an English junior girls' team to the USA and Canada.

The ambitious plan includes participation in the USA’s West Coast championship in Washington State, as well as representative games against Canadian provincial teams. The tour will take place in July 2008, but the first stage in selection for the tour party will begin in only two weeks time when the region’s county trials take place.

Girls selected for Essex, Hertfordshire and Eastern Counties (Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire) will take part in the region’s U17 trials in January, and the squad selected at those trials will effectively be the one that will travel to North America.

The tour is the latest example of the dramatic growth of girls’ rugby in the region. New clubs and opportunities for girls to play the game have mushroomed in recent years, and the East Region’s representative teams have grown to become one of the strongest in the country with top four finishes by all age groups in National Championships in the past two years.

The tour is also made possible by changes in the age banding for girls rugby. The top age band will move from U17 to U18 next September, which will mean that the East squad will be able stay together for two seasons, giving the stability to allow for long term planning required to organise such a tour.

Girls’ rugby is a fast growing sport in the USA and Canada as well – a quarter of all American rugby players are women, and the USA and Canadian national teams are amongst the strongest in the world – indeed Canada is staging the Women’s World Cup at the moment. The girls can expect that the tour will not feature any easy games.

Claire Sanderson, the RFUW's Regional Development Officer said: "The RFUW is very pleased to be able to support such a keen and enthusiastic body of volunteers in providing new and exciting opportunities for young players in Essex, Eastern Counties and Hertfordshire. With such preparation, we can only imagine the excellent programme that these girls will have access to. We wish the Tour Committee all the best with their organisation of this event and look forward to hearing about its progress"