BRISTOL – Answering a phone call on WhatsApp, Holly Phillips is in Bristol, England, only one week removed from ankle reconstruction surgery.
With her left foot inside a medical boot and using a knee scooter to get around, she finds a quieter room and goes over the gruesome details from the day she got badly injured.
Despite rehabbing, the Canmore-raised professional rugby player is laser-focused on returning to the pitch and she is hyper aware of a tight, stressful timeline she’s under.
“I’m doing OK, but I think this is the biggest mental test of my career so far,” said Phillips.
At 25 years old, the hard-hitting, multi-faceted front-row forward has spent nearly a decade rising through the ranks in the sport, from heartbreak to jubilation, leading overseas to the Bristol Bears in Premiership Women’s Rugby, an elite 15s club league.
Now, less than a year away from the 2025 World Cup, the payoff of a five-year goal and what is to be the pinnacle of her rugby journey, Phillips has been debilitated by an injury that doctors say will take 12 weeks to fully recover.
Her ankle snapped during the first contact session at the Bears’ training camp at the backend of August.
Phillips was getting some field time ahead of the WXV, a World Rugby tournament taking place in Vancouver, in which she was going to be on Canada’s roster. More national team eyes would have been on Phillips, who’s vying for a spot at the World Cup, an every four years occurrence.
On a routine tackle and ruck, Phillips’ shoe studs stuck in the ground as another player rolled over top of her, tearing apart her syndesmotic ligament, which runs between the tibia and fibula, as well as two other ligaments in her ankle.
“Basically my whole foot just spun and was facing the wrong way,” said Phillips.
“I was crying out in both pain and, like, disappointment, as well, because I knew the turnaround and the timing was like a week-and-a-half difference.
“My parents had their flights booked because it’s accessible for them being in Canada, but it just made the news a really difficult one.”
Phillips added she feels privileged for the immediate medical care and to now be on the road to recovery.
“Now that I had my reaction and I felt my anger and my feelings and I think the only beauty of it is a World Cup year and I don’t have any time to dwell on the situation,” she said.
“I can’t reverse time in my little world so I have to be as productive with the time as I can be otherwise I’ll be kicking myself when June rolls around.”
Phillips will still train with the Bears in a modified version. One of the bright spots that she sees for herself is fine-tuning other areas of her game. Primarily playing across the front-row, the brutal ankle injury is better than a shoulder injury because she can still throw and sharpen other specialist skills.
In Phillips’ mind, she knows she has nine months to recover, return as an established player and regain confidence in her role by June 2025. Phillips said it puts an immense amount of pressure on her timeline; however, her entire focus this year, and one of her ultimate goals in the sport, has been to play at a World Cup.
“The dream, since I was 15 playing for the Banff Bears, was a senior international cap and a World Cup,” she said.
“As a young woman that’s played a lot of rugby for the last 10 years, I know my career isn’t going to last forever and this was a massive milestone for me.”
