The power of sevens needs recharging
Launch of innovative hub at U of T should help Canadians build on Olympic breakthrough
Canada’s rugby sevens women made history in Rio by winning one of the first medals in a new Olympic sport, but head coach John Tait took no time to bask in that success. He was already thinking about the future — and he was worried.
The bronze medal would raise the profile of this fast-paced version of the game, he said then, but a repeat would take much more than that.
Canada is an enormous country with little rugby infrastructure: few children start the sport early, as they do with soccer and hockey; there are no elite provincial sevens leagues where up-and-comers can hone their skills; the only national centre where sevens athletes train year-round is in Langford, B.C.; and there’s no professional rugby here.
Top rugby nations — including Australia, which won the women’s Olympic gold, and New Zealand, which took silver — have all that and more.
“That’s the big concern,” assistant national coach Sandro Fiorino said. “We got so far, we won a bronze medal, but with limited infrastructure.”
The players and coaches know that’s unlikely to happen again, given how quickly the sport is growing and improving globally — becoming a distinct sport, not simply an offshoot of traditional 15-a-side rugby.
To remain a top contender in the women’s game, they all agree, Canada needs more players (starting younger) with a sevens-specific pathway to high-performance training and competition to feed future national teams.
Canada’s men, who did not qualify for the Rio Olympics in sevens, face many of the same problems along with losing top talent to professional 15s teams abroad.
To develop the women’s game, Fiorino — whose coaching role has expanded to include regional development in Ontario and Quebec — has moved to Toronto to oversee the launch of a rugby academy focused on the next generation.
The academy, based at the University of Toronto’s Goldring Centre for High Performance Sport, is to be unveiled next week. It will focus on talented high school players, ages 14 to 18, and university athletes crossing over from other sports.
“We’re trying to build up some depth for the 2020 and 2024 (Olympic) cycles,” Fiorino said.
Rugby Canada has also partnered with the Canada West Universities Athletics Association — with funding from B2ten, an organization that supports amateur athletes — to launch a women’s sevens league including six western universities on a three-year trial.
Right now, there are only 25 fulltime women’s sevens players in Canada, based at national training centre in Langford. That’s not a lot when 12 are needed for each HSBC women’s sevens series event, and injuries in this game of speed and hard tackles are all too common. The gap between the top few players and everyone else is significant, leaving the Canadian team in a bind when injuries force them to call up less-experienced players.
The Toronto academy — which will provide skills development and physical training similar to that in Langford — will start to close that gap and make the transition to the top ranks easier and faster, Fiorino said — adding the location also represents an important move forward for rugby in Canada.
Rugby infrastructure has long been based in B.C., where the outdoor playing season is longer, but the biggest pool of talent is in Ontario, much of it in and around Toronto. More than 60 per cent of the women at the national training centre are from Ontario.
“The big challenge is that anyone who has coached sevens in Canada over the last 25 years is in a 50kilometre radius of Victoria,” Fiorino said about his relocation. “So, I’m not just developing players. I’m developing coaches at the same time.”
Breanne Nicholas, one of the Ontario athletes at the national centre, is on Fiorino’s development-level squad at this weekend’s Rugby Americas North Sevens tournament in Trinidad and Tobago. She’s hoping to show she’s ready to join the national team for the first world sevens stop in Dubai on Dec. 1 and 2.
She started playing rugby 15s as soon as she hit high school in Blenheim, Ont., but it wasn’t until she was 20 and in university that she played her first sevens games. Nicholas and the rest of the current crop of top players wish those opportunities had come sooner.
Getting athletes into the rugby sevens game much earlier, and providing a competitive pathway to the elite level, will determine whether Canada can stand on another Olympic podium, said Toronto’s Ghislaine Landry, a team veteran and the top scorer in all of women’s rugby.
“Every country has gotten better every year and, at this point, it’s about developing a system that will continue to produce good players,” Landry said. “Australia is already at the top of the game, and we need to get on that.”
Jen Kish, the Rio team captain, agrees.
“The speed and skill set athletes are coming in the game now with is incomparable to three years ago,” Kish said. “If we don’t start getting kids to develop their skills, just like we do with hockey, we’re going to fall behind the other countries.”