It’s a milestone year for 17-year-old Niverville athlete Zoe Bardal as she prepares to represent Manitoba this August at the Canada Summer Games in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Starting on August 11, and continuing through August 13, Bardal and her talented teammates will compete in U18 rugby sevens against Canada’s top teams.

Bardal, who graduates this year from Steinbach Regional Secondary School with a culinary major, will play the position of winger number seven.

Rugby sevens, also known simply as “sevens,” is a style of rugby that makes up seven players playing seven-minute halves. This is opposed to a more typical rugby match with 15 players playing 40-minute halves.

While rugby is a somewhat lesser-known sport in rural Manitoba, the community is close-knit. And in a sport known to be quite rough, Bardal says its players are steeped in community, safety awareness, and respect.

“We’re enemies on the field, but we’re always friends off the field, no matter what team you’re on,” she says. “It’s such a community sport.”

Growing up, Bardal was no stranger to participation in sports, beginning with figure skating at the age of five. She progressed through the years to compete at the Star 3 level, specializing in the elements category and developing a proficiency for a move known as the spiral.

In 2018, at the age of 12, Bardal pronounced her “retirement” from skating, as her mother fondly recalls, following a silver medal win with her Niverville synchronized skating team.

At ten, after years of watching rugby with her dad, Bardal joined a flag rugby team in Niverville. After a brief hiatus, she then joined the Niverville High School rugby team before transferring to Steinbach Regional, where she took on the position of hooker from Grades 10 to 12 with the Steinbach Sabres.

In the summer of 2024, the Sabres made their way to the Manitoba Summer Games in Dauphin and placed fourth. That’s when Bardal and others received a letter of invitation from this year’s coaches to train and try out for the 2025 Canada Summer Games.

Bardal is excitement over the timing, since these Games only happen every four years.

“I’m actually at the perfect age,” she says. “Same with the Manitoba Summer Games as well. I hit the absolute jackpot. I know how lucky I am. Very, very lucky.”

Bardal’s invitation to compete in Newfoundland, however, is anything but luck. The game requires strength, power, speed, endurance, agility, and mental toughness—and Bardal has those qualities in spades.

“I used to be one of the slowest on the team, so I started doing speed training at the running track here in Niverville. I didn’t really know what to do, but I would just do interval training—sprinting, walking, sprinting, and doing the stretches and warmups.”

Following training in December 2024, Bardal incorporated coach-led speed training.

In April 2025, she discovered that she had advanced through the first round of provincial team cuts.

The top athletes were then invited to a school in British Columbia that specializes in high-performance rugby training, combining the program with academics.

Bardal’s efforts have also earned accolades from someone she looks up to and admires in the sport—Tahnee Grosskopf, a coach and physical education teacher in Steinbach. Grosskopf is also the daughter of Colleen Horton, a past Team Canada rugby player and Rugby Manitoba Hall of Famer. From Grosskopf, Bardal has received several playful yet meaningful awards: Ultimate Unicorn of Supreme Glory, the Sponge Award recognizing her curiosity and enthusiasm, and Outstanding Play as Hooker for her performance in the front position.

In Newfoundland, Bardal will play winger number seven, a position often referred to affectionately as “wheels.” It’s an endearing way to acknowledge that the player has speed—another confirmation that Bardal’s training has paid off.

As Bardal heads east, she remains rooted in Niverville and the surrounding community. She’s already looking ahead to how she can bring more awareness to the game of rugby in southern Manitoba. She hopes to develop her coaching skills under Grosskopf’s mentorship and invites anyone curious about the sport to come down to the Maple Grove Rugby Park in south Winnipeg. 

“Maple Grove Rugby Park becomes like a home to everybody,” Bardal says of the local rugby community. “You can show up any day and there’s always rugby going on. You meet so many amazing people.”