Olivia Apps knows how adversity can shape a person.

Now she's learning how it can shape a group as she leads Canada's women's rugby seven's team through a so-called "group of death" at the Paris Olympics.

As captain of the squad, Apps has become a face of Canadian rugby in recent years — and her image, with her broad smile and bald head, is a striking one.

The 25-year-old from Lindsay, Ont., has alopecia. She began losing her hair when she was seven years old.

While the disease has been a major challenge, Apps said it's also shaped who she is as a person.

"I lost my hair at a young age and that was probably actually a great time for me," she said. "Because I think if I were in high school or my 20s, that would be a different set of challenges. But when I was younger, I quickly understood what it meant to be comfortable in my own skin."

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It took doctors nearly a year to diagnose Apps with alopecia, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss.

Awareness of the condition is still lacking, she said, and she routinely gets questions about whether she is going through chemotherapy or if she shaves her head.

"I think — women especially, but men as well — but a lot of people aren't comfortably bald," Apps said. "So they don't see a lot of people without hair, they don't see a lot of women without hair. So I don't think that enables a lot of awareness because there's not a lot of exposure to it."

As a kid, she tried wearing a wig but found it brought a lot of insecurity.

"At home, around my friends, around my sisters, I felt comfortable with having no hair and not thinking twice about it. But then going to school, feeling like I had to cover something or hide something, didn't make me feel good," she explained.

"Even though I was only seven years old, I knew there was something so powerful in just being able to say `Hey, this is who I am and I don't actually care what anyone thinks."'

Apps started dreaming of the Olympics when she was in high school and Canada's women's rugby sevens team won bronze at the 2016 Games in Rio. She played three games for Canada at the Tokyo Olympics where Canada finished ninth.

The experience in Paris will be completely different, Apps said.

"Tokyo was just literally no fans. And it was kind of an anticlimactic situation because it was my first Olympics, it was obviously so exciting to be selected and to share it with my family, but then that was kind of it. I couldn't really share a big part of it with them," she said. "So to have them there in Paris, it will in a lot of ways feel like my first Olympics."

Gearing up for the Games hasn't been easy. Much of the team moved on after Tokyo, leaving the program to rebuild a contender in just three years instead of the usual four.

The process has been "a little daunting," Apps said.

The Canadians head to Paris having claimed silver at the 2023 Pan American Games in Chile. The squad also finished fifth in the world rugby sevens series last season, and won bronze in front of home fans at the Vancouver stop.

"The past three years we've built so much, kind of starting from building blocks again from the ground up," said Keyara Wardley, who also played for Canada in Tokyo. "We're really excited about all the effort we've put in as a whole group."

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Competition will be tough when rugby sevens begins in Paris.

Canada will start the tournament against sixth-ranked Fiji on July 28 before taking on No. 1 New Zealand later that day. On July 29, they'll face China, which did not play in the highest level of the sevens series last season. Medal games will be played on July 30.

Facing high-ranking opponents isn't a concern for the Canadians, said Olympic rookie Chloe Daniels.

"We've proven to ourselves this whole year that we were able to beat any team on the series that we played" she said. "And I think we can take confidence in that. I think we trust each other, we trust our staff, we trust our process going into it. No worries here."

WATCH l Heather Hiscox looks ahead to Friday's opening ceremony:

Media Video | Olympic action underway as Paris 2024 opening ceremony approaches

Caption: Heather Hiscox breaks down all the latest news surrounding the Canadian women's soccer team, updates events that are currently in action and looks ahead to Friday's opening ceremony.

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