李念殷

English

Li Nim-yan, known as Melody Li, is a Hong Kong China women's rugby international who plays as a back for the local premiership club Gai Wu and is a long-serving former co-captain of the Hong Kong women's sevens team. A graduate of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, she took up Western boxing in secondary school, first tried non-contact rugby in Form 3, and joined the all-Chinese local club Gai Wu in Form 6 to play the full-contact game, going on to fall in love with rugby through the atmosphere of the CUHK team. As far back as 2013 she represented Hong Kong at the National Games, one of only two players in the current squad to have featured at those Games (the other being Natasha Olson-Thorne); after disappointments at the 2014 Incheon and 2018 Jakarta Asian Games, she finally won a historic bronze with the Hong Kong women's sevens team at the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou in September 2023, describing the winning moment in the bronze-medal match as the most memorable of her rugby career. She stepped away from the game in early 2024 and gave birth to a baby in September that year, returning in July 2025 at the LITS Super 7s in London for her first Hong Kong appearance in about 18 months, and said she hoped to make the National Games and Asian Games squads. In November 2025 she was named in Hong Kong's women's sevens squad for the 15th National Games at Kai Tak Stadium. By the 2026 Hong Kong Sevens she had earned 38 sevens caps for Hong Kong.