You would not know it from Ounsley’s contagious positivity, but there have, of course, been challenges on the way to becoming an international rugby player.
“It’s funny to look back on,” she says after recounting the time a referee gave her a yellow card in a school final at Twickenham because they thought she was being rude, not knowing she could not hear.
Ounsley is continuously finding strategies to better work with her team and has told England coaches she needs to speak to them face-to-face, rather than shouting from across the pitch, so that she can lip read.
She still claims not to be a confident person, but these changes are a sign of the greater self-belief she has developed since leaving the Twickenham pitch without explaining to the referee what was really going on that day.
“If you saw me two years ago, I would never have gone up to a coach if I was struggling to hear,” she says.
“Even before I was in the England Sevens programme, they knew I was deaf but there’s a lot more to it.
“It’s quite difficult and I’m still working on it even years later. The key thing is being honest and up-front with people, letting them know what you can and can’t do and working round it.”
