New Tamworth women's head coach Rob Mills says he is happy with how they are coming along with just over a month until the New England competition kicks-off.
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After coming on board mid-way through last season to help coach Natasha Field out after son - Magpies frontrower Harry - volunteered him to assist, Mills has stepped up to the top job this season with Field expecting and subsequently taking a bit of a step back.
"We've got a good group of women coming through, lots that have played before," he said.
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They have been supplemented by a few new faces with numbers looking pretty good.
Mills said they have about 18 players committed to the season and have consistently been getting a good roll up at training. Some sessions they have even had more than the men, he noted.
There has been a fair bit to work through.
With the competition moving from 7s to 10s this season, it has meant having to go back to the basics a bit and focus a lot more on structure, and the art of the scrums and lineouts with a greater emphasis on set pieces in the 10s game.
Mills said that has been one of the biggest challenges as well as "getting girls used to playing in positions they haven't played before".
Having their first 10s hit-out in the recent Armidale Knockout, they showed some promising signs.
"A lot of the girls that haven't played before played very well," Mills remarked.
They had another run on Saturday playing cross-town rivals Pirates before the Magpies' men's trial against Brothers.
It was originally meant to be 10s but they had a number of players unavailable so ended up playing 7s, Pirates for the record claiming the spoils.
Mills said it was good to get a bit more game time into them but other than that it was hard to really take too much away given how many players they were missing (they only had eight), although he thought there was "a lot of good tackling and backing up of play."
They have another game this coming Saturday against Gunnedah and should have a few more players on deck for what will be "a good test" for them.
"We're looking forward to trying to put some of the plays we've been working on into place," Mills said.
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