Joyce, along with her Wales teammates Hannah Jones and Alisha Butchers, spent three months playing for the ‘Romas’ and believes the experience has stood the trio in good stead ahead of the Six Nations – and sevens season.
“We are practically living at the National Centre of Excellence at the moment, training with both the sevens and Six Nations squads, but I’m loving it.
“The positiveness everyone’s bringing at the moment means it’s a great environment to be part of and it’s what we want to be doing.
“Playing with and against some of the best sevens players in the world for the Romas was amazing. I learned so much from seeing how other people play sevens and hopefully now we can bring our experience back to the 15-a-side game in Wales.
“Today was my first game time for Wales since last year’s Six Nations and we can’t wait to play Italy now in two weeks’ time.
“I watched the autumn games from Australia before coming home and I really feared for my place with some exciting new players coming through.
“Selection for our opening game is getting close and we all want to up our game to put our hands up. I definitely think having new young players in the squad has made us more competitive and added an important edge to training.”
Wales Women played Ireland in a training match on Sunday. They lost the game 22-12, Alisha Butchers and Kerin Lake scoring the Wales’ two tries, Lleucu George adding a conversion but it was a much needed and useful learning exercise according to Wales coach Chris Horsman.
“We were pleased in parts – particularly defensively – but overall it was a positive experience as we now have two weeks to improve in some key areas including ball retention. We are very much developing as a group but we have key targets we want to achieve in all of our Six Nations games. Hopefully that will translate into wins along the way but first and foremost we want to raise our game across the board.”
The players in the Six Nations and sevens training squads are currently part of a fully integrated, athlete-centre performance programme, something Jazz is relishing.
“Most of us enjoy playing both sevens and 15s so it would be a shame if we had to choose just one format.”
Joyce is looking forward to running out at Cardiff Arms Park in the opening game.
“Italy always bring something different, they are a flair team that are on the up, but so are we. Then we have Ireland away so building on today’s performance we’ll be looking for a good start to the tournament.”
Go to wru.wales/waleswomen for tickets for Wales’ home games.
