Two years ago Alina Prokopenko had never picked up a rugby ball in her life, but now she is one of the most exciting young female players coming through the ranks in Scotland.
And this season Alina is one of 10 players who have been awarded financial bursaries by The Bill McLaren Foundation.
Five female players and five male players – Alina, Lucy MacRae, Nicole Marlow, Gemma Thomson, Ellie Williamson, Finlay Anderson, Hamish Seggie, Michael Scarth, Zak Burgess and Cammy McGarey – are benefitting benefit from a combined pot of £30,000 made available by The Bill McLaren Foundation to assist with the challenges presented to a young player in order that they can dedicate more of their time on task to the sport.
“The bursary is really helpful,” Alina, a 19-year-old back-row, said.
“Rugby takes up a lot of my time now and I balance it with my sports coaching studies at Edinburgh College and working so having the help from the bursary will help me to really focus on things as they come along and become the best rugby player I can be.
“Being part of the rugby community is a new thing to me, but now I can’t imagine life without it.
“It all started in my last year of high school.
“I was a pupil at Newbattle High School in Midlothian and we were doing a rugby block as part of our sports development studies.
“We were learning all about the sport so that, as older pupils, we could take it into primary schools and teach the younger kids all about it.
“As a result, we had to learn drills and little games and while we were doing that I was thinking ‘this is pretty good’. That same day there was a girls’ rugby session happening at lunchtime and my friend and I decided to go along to it.
“At the lunchtime session we were practicing tackling on the tackling shields and, honestly, after I did my first tackle, I was like ‘whoa, this is great’.
“The rugby filled day kept coming as the then Dalkeith rugby club development officer Jason Hendrie suggested I should go down to a girls’ rugby session at the club that evening.
“That training was really fun and, after that first session at Dalkeith, I just kept going back and back and my mad rugby journey had begun.”
Alina, who has a horse called Frankie, began playing for the Dalkeith under-18s for the rest of the 2024/25 season and, by April 2025 after also playing regional games, she was named in the Scotland under-18 squad for the Six Nations Festival at Wellington College down south.
Down there the Scots played shortened 35-minute matches against France, Wales, England, and Ireland before concluding the festival with a full 70-minute clash against Italy.
“When I got told I was in the squad for that trip I was like ‘oh my gosh, this is so exciting’,” Alina recounts.
“And it was such an amazing experience. I had only been playing rugby properly for about six months by that stage so I was learning things all the time and just tried to take everything in.
“That summer I left school and played my first ever Arnold Clark Women’s Premiership games with Heriot’s.
“The club and the senior players there were really good with me and then I got a realm shock when I was called into the Edinburgh Rugby squad for the Celtic Challenge campaign at the end of 2025 into 2026.
“In the Edinburgh environment I just took every opportunity I could to talk to people around me, got to know everyone and was asking questions to the coaches and to the more experienced players.
“Then getting some game time in the Celtic Challenge came along and it was a big step up, but I just gave it my best shot and felt proud to be representing Edinburgh.”
Since then, Alina, whose surname comes from Latvian origins, has been part of the Scotland under-21 set up and played for the Scotland A team in the Netherlands over the summer.
This season she is playing club rugby for Heriot’s once again and is part of Scottish Rugby’s national academy programme which sees her training regularly at Oriam with a large group of the best up-and-coming talent.
“It has been a crazy two years for me in rugby so far, but I would not change it for the world,” Alina concluded.
“I have made so many friends, learnt so much and grown as a player and as a person in that time and had lots of fun.
“Now I just have to keep working hard and see where it takes me.”
Alina Prokopenko is pictured
It is shaping up to be an exciting 2026/27 season for women’s rugby in Scotland and GH Media will be covering it in detail – if any companies are keen to support this content please send an email to gary@gh-media.co.uk