(CNN)She was once the reluctant rugby player from a Rio de Janiero favela, now teenager Eshyllen Coimbra Cordoso is pulling on a Brazil jersey for the national sevens side.
A keen volleyball player as a youngster, friends would try to lure her to the neighboring rugby games on Copacabana beach but her reaction was always the same: “No, no, no rugby.”
“My friends were always like, ‘give it a go,’ but I didn’t like it,” she recalled to CNN via a translator.
