Not exactly Sevens heaven

That saying about the world being a smaller place? Depends on the wifi.

Spend weeks on the road like Claire Keohane and Andalusia hotels begin to blend into one, no matter how classy or grotty. Rooms, beds, showers? Whatever. What kinda signal have you got buddy?

It isn’t just Keohane.

Pretty much everyone on the Ireland Women’s Sevens team is the same. No matter what the destination, wifi trumps everything: your digs, your food or whether the building is located next to a view of outstanding natural beauty or buried deep in the bowels of an industrial estate.

“We’re fortunate in that most of the places we stay have wifi,” says the 22-year old. “Some places don’t have it though and its funny because our coach John Skurr always says that we could stay in the worst places in the world and we would be happy as long as we had wifi.”

That life on tour. It’s the simplest of pleasures that can make all the difference and free wifi brings the cost of touring down and keeps the link to home secure while they go about their business.

Seemingly silly stuff, like who gets to choose the music on the team bus, assumes an importance of ridiculous proportions, especially when there are Garth Brooks fans like captain Shannon Huston eager to inflict their acoustic pain on everyone’s ears.

No-one would try to suggest that it is anything other than a wonderful way to live your life but the global circuit on which the Irish women compete offers all sorts of challenges to people who, lest we forget, are not professional athletes.

Some on the team juggle life on the Sevens merry-go-round with jobs, others spend their free time on their studies while a few again have neither distraction to hinder or help them while away the evenings.

“You get used to rooming with people and you get to a stage where you can be in the room together in a comfortable silence but the downtime isn’t huge,” says Keohane. “You have a job to do and any complacency needs to be stamped out early.”

‘Out there’ is a variety of disparate venues.

Last year was the team’s first on the road and they checked through customs in Amsterdam, Moscow, Hong Kong and China. This year’s carousel kicked off in Dubai last November and continued on Saturday in Atlanta where they bettered the Netherlands before falling to expected defeats to New Zealand and England in the pool stages.

Yesterday saw them wrap matters up in Georgia and they fly on directly now to Sao Paolo for next weekend’s leg of the world tour, unsure as to what standards of food and board — and wifi — await in the Brazilian city. That’s part of competing in a competition which is constantly breaking new ground. Some good, some not so.

Moscow last summer was the worst.

The Russian capital’s infamous traffic jams stand out in Keohane’s mind, even now, eight months later. It was so bad the Welsh boys were told to give themselves between one and five hours to reach the airport from their hotel.

The best has been Hong Kong. For Keohane, somewhere new and different always gets the thumbs up although there is always the temptation to close your curtains to the world and spend their rare hours or days off in bed.

This latest trip is all the more challenging for the back-to-back events in the US and Brazil and the inevitable wear and tear has prompted the IRFU to send 14 players, though only a dozen can register for each competition.

The aim is they’ll return to Brazil for the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 although time is against them as they look to make light of their late entry to the Sevens scene and catch stride with the game’s giants.

“The qualification will come from the 2015 World Series. The top four teams go through and then it comes down to regional qualifiers. At the World Cup in Moscow we finished in the top group and got core status for this year. That was hugely important because it meant we got to play in every series. Up to that we were depending on invitations and we were only getting a few per year. You need to benchmark yourself against the best whenever you can.”

Atlanta will go a long way towards that. Further trips to Amsterdam and Guangzhao in China, in April in May, will wrap up the series for the year by which time it is hoped that an Irish team blooding numerous new players via a concerted ID talent campaign will have begun to find its feet.

“With the Sevens it’s a real learning curve and it’s one where we have to learn fast,” Keohane admits. “We won the Plate final in China and beat Holland and Australia along the way but we had our strongest squad then.

“We’re at a stage now where we have lost some girls to the Six Nations and we are giving some new players an opportunity to play on the circuit so we have to see how we get on between Atlanta and Sao Paolo.”