Alex “Spiff” Sedrick captured the attention of the world on July 30 when she scored the game-winning try to win the Olympic bronze medal for the U.S. in women’s rugby sevens.
With only eight seconds left in the game, Sedrick caught a pass, broke a couple of tackles and took off down nearly the entire length of the field with nothing but green grass in front of her and tied the game against Australia.
She then kicked the conversion to put the U.S. ahead, securing the win in the bronze-medal match.
That play, and the team’s performance throughout the Olympics, propelled Sedrick and her teammates into the spotlight, along with the sport they love.
While they didn’t win gold, the U.S. women made history by winning the nation’s first rugby sevens medal in the Olympics and first rugby Olympic medal since the men’s 15s team won in 1924.
“I’m just overwhelmed with so much love and support from not only my community that I’ve had at home — people that have been in my corner for years — but the American rugby community in general. I think that we got a lot of eyes on the game in this last week,” Sedrick told the Deseret News. “I feel like we really solidified some fans that we got for our performance in Paris.”
Here’s the story of how Sedrick went from Utah’s Herriman High to the U.S. Olympic record books.
Alex Sedrick’s Utah rugby roots
When Jeff Wilson started the rugby program in Herriman — originally just a boys team — he had three goals for the program: win national championships, produce All-Americans and send a player to the Olympics.
Herriman has now accomplished all three — thanks to Sedrick.
“We always knew Spiff was capable of something like this, but to see it come to fruition, just — it’s the coolest thing in the world,” Wilson told the Deseret News.
The Olympics were not on Sedrick’s radar when she started playing rugby in high school. But the Herriman program changed that and became a “huge catalyst” in her development and career, she said.
“I think at the time that I started playing, I didn’t even know that it was an Olympic sport, but I definitely didn’t see this being a long-term thing,” she said. “I just wanted to play for as long as my friends were still playing.”
Despite her smaller stature, Sedrick picked up the rules of rugby faster than most of the other girls and didn’t shy away from the physicality of the game.
“She ran right at people. She just enjoyed the contact, and so when I saw her break those two tackles and not try and invade them, but run through them, that was just classic Alex Sedrick,” Joe Hoff, Sedrick’s former head coach at Herriman, said of her performance in the bronze medal match.
Ashlee Sollowen, who started Herriman’s girls team and is a former national team player, described Sedrick as a “silent assassin” and “a machine on the field.”
“There was just something in her that lit up and clicked when it was time to tackle. I mean, she was the person that at practice, they’d say, ‘We’re doing tackling practice,’ and she’s the smallest one out there, and everyone would run away from her. She just hit so hard, and she was so clinical and just had no fear,” she said.
Sedrick’s clutch performance in the bronze-medal match came as no surprise to anyone who knew her from high school, Sollowen said. Sedrick could always be counted on in the game’s biggest and smallest moments.
“We used to always say if anyone in our games missed tackles, we could count on Spiff to clean it up for us because she was always there. She was the biggest hitter in high school rugby in the entire state of Utah, and that was what everybody else lacked. We could pass, we could run, but none of us knew how to hit like she knew how to hit,” Sollowen said.
That physicality paid off in the bronze-medal match, Wilson said.
He pointed out a key play by Sedrick in the second half of the bronze-medal match that made her viral try possible. Australia’s Maddison Levi had broken two tackles and was on her way to scoring a try that would give Australia the lead when Sedrick, the last woman between Levi and the goal line, tackled her.
“She came and made a great tackle that kept them in the game, that kept Australia from getting all the momentum, and if Australia has that try on the board, that run at the end doesn’t win the game for them. So defensively, she was huge,” Wilson said.
Sedrick’s rugby career almost didn’t continue to the collegiate level. But she got in contact with head coach Rosalind Chou at Life University in the fall after her senior year and was offered a scholarship. Less than two years later, she had joined the team in Marietta, Georgia.
“Other sports have a much broader range of schools that you can pick from, whereas the rugby community’s so small. You don’t have that many,” she said. “(Chou) is such a big supporter of pushing me to go play as far as I want to play, and she released me quite a few times from the Life roster so that I could go on and play at a higher level with the U.S. team. So really grateful for the hand that she had played in that.”
Sedrick had been exposed to the national team through her participation in the U.S.’s pathways program in high school and in the Hawkeye program, which allowed college players to train with the national team every six weeks or so for a one-week period. She described those Hawkeye program trainings as “baptism by fire.”
“It was very much like a just throw you in there, try not to drown. You’re just going to try to keep up with everybody. It was really good for us, coming from college and getting to play at those higher levels,” she said. “I really think that really rose me to the level that I could join senior residency by the time that I graduated.”
What the U.S. women’s rugby sevens Olympic medal means for the sport
The fact that the U.S. women’s rugby team was the one to put a spotlight on the sport doesn’t come as a surprise to Hoff.
“Growth in rugby will come from the women’s game. In my mind, that is an unequivocal truth. Doubting that is like doubting that the sun rises in the east. Boys have too many other opportunities of contact sports to play young ladies do not and there is much more untapped talent in the female pool,” he said.
That growth is already in motion.
Following the bronze-medal win at the end of July, businesswoman Michele Kang, who owns three women’s soccer teams, announced she’ll be donating $4 million to the U.S. women’s rugby team over the course of the next four years “to support these outstanding athletes to realize their dream in capturing the gold in Los Angeles in 2028,” per USA Rugby.
Whether Sedrick is one of those players competing in Los Angeles in 2028 remains to be seen — she said it isn’t completely off the table.
But what is certain is Sedrick’s involvement in growing the sport post-Olympics.
On Saturday, Sedrick returned to her old stomping grounds at Herriman High to play touch rugby and sign autographs as part of a fundraiser for the Spiff Fund she launched with the Utah Warriors professional rugby team. All donations will go to Utah Youth Rugby, Utah Little Rugby and girls rugby clubs.
Sedrick hopes her medal and team’s performance in Paris can spark people’s interest in playing rugby and create a deeper player pool, similar to those in rugby powerhouse countries like Australia and New Zealand.
“The reality of it is this team that just performed in Paris, we will not be playing forever, and the next generation has to come in and lift. We say a lot that we’re just passing through the jersey, so to bring the jersey to the podium in 2024 I feel like puts it in a great position for whoever will come in next to play in ‘28,” she said.