Lost Generation
Youngsters around the world have been missing out on rugby both at school and club level due to the pandemic. Will this have a long-term impact on the game? As the f ir st steps ar e taken towards a r eturn, RW investigates
THE LAST rugby match St John’s School in Leatherhead played was when their U15s beat St Lawrence College in the semi-final of the England Rugby National Vase competition on 3 March 2020. It was a tough, gritty victory, St John’s scraping through 10-3, and one can picture the joy of the boys as they looked forward to the final at Twickenham. Little did they, or St John’s director of rugby Craig
Newby, imagine what lay in store.
For Newby, the former Leicester and New Zealand loose forward, the cessation of school sport has been hard to bear. He had arrived at St
John’s (the alma mater of George Kruis) in 2017 and swiftly started to achieve results among the school’s 23 teams. As well as the U15s’ success, the school’s U18 side won the Rosslyn Park Sevens Vase title in 2017.
But for Newby it had always been as much about participation as winning. He says: “When I came
in I wanted to make rugby more inclusive at every level and make sure that the coaching and playing vibe we had was positive, about having fun and enjoying it with your mates. We’ve got some good growth out of that, more teams and more boys playing. We had three or four girls playing when I came and had 60 last year regularly training.” And then came coronavirus.
Schools in the UK closed on 20 March 2020 and reopened only in June. But it was a sterile return with no competitive sport. And then schools shut up shop again on 5 January and have only started to reopen in recent weeks, but again with restrictions in place that inhibit any attempt at serious sport.
The extent of the negative effect of lockdown on young people’s fitness was laid bare by a study published by Sport England in January. It revealed there had been a 16% decrease in the number of children taking part in sporting activities, and that during the lockdown nearly one third (2.3m) didn’t even manage 30 minutes of exercise a day.
One hopes that in September life will be back to normal, but Newby anticipates that 18 months without rugby will have taken its toll. “The kids have been treading water for more than a year,” he says. “We have lost that connection. It’s been a real pause and this I imagine is the same for every school in the country. When you lose that connection with the kids it’s hard to keep them
– not motivated, they’re still keen on sport – but to keep them engaged.”
St John’s have initiated a series of creative online programmes to try to keep the boys and girls engaged, but there’s no substitute for the thrill of actually throwing a ball to your mates.
“Ultimately it’s so much about the engagement with friends, the structural routine, building through the week for Saturday’s game, preparing for each match, thinking about your game, then the excitement levels rising ahead of Saturday; that can’t be replaced, no matter how much you try to be creative,” says Newby.
South Africa has faced a similar problem. Coronavirus has swept the country with as much virulence as it has in Western Europe, and school rugby was curtailed late last March. For the first time in its 56-year history there was no Craven Week – the annual schoolboy rugby tournament named after Springbok great Danie Craven – and the other festivals that are such an important fabric of schools rugby in South Africa were also cancelled.
Kearsney College in KwaZulu-Natal, where both Matt Stevens and Brad Barritt were pupils, is celebrating its centenary this year but the festivities have been muted by the pandemic. The College’s Easter Rugby Festival, one of the centrepieces of the celebrations, has been indefinitely postponed and Barend Steyn, the director of rugby, believes their best-case scenario will be a return to inter-school rugby in May.
Steyn, who has been coaching at Kearsney for 20 years, feels great sadness for those boys whose rugby pinnacle would have been in their school colours. “Most of our pupils will not participate in the sport after school but they do take rugby quite seriously, and representing their alma mater is a huge honour and privilege,” he says. “The realisation of missing out on these opportunities is emotionally taxing and noticeable in behaviour patterns.”
The cream of Kearsney’s first XV squad will hope to secure professional contracts in the years ahead, but the cancellation of Craven Week in 2020 and the ongoing suspension of inter-school rugby matches will have ramifications for their ambitions, says Steyn. “We’re very fortunate to have this platform to display our young talent to the professional scouts (but) they’ll have to find alternative methods and ways of attracting these players to their academies and unions,” he says. “This will be extremely challenging.”
St John’s School has good links with Harlequins and London Irish, says Newby, for those kids he describes as “aspirational”. However, the fact that these talented young players haven’t played any competitive rugby for well over a year will have consequences.
“I think there will be a knock-on effect from not having that high-level competition week in, week out, and then attempting to push on to an academy system,” he says. “There will be a gap in tempo, so I think there could be some catch-up required. It will require hard work but I think they can do it.”
While a talented minority of school players will win a place at a professional academy, more will look to continue their rugby at the university of their choice. One of the most celebrated is Edinburgh, where Dave Adamson is director of rugby. The university has 140 players and puts out five teams, but the first XV haven’t played since February 2020.
Adamson arranged to have some gym equipment delivered to members of the performance squad, but there has been little in the way of online engagement.
“I have asked the squad if they want to do anything online but most of their lives are spent online at the moment
(in lectures) and I think for a lot of students it’s become saturated.”
If it’s been a frustrating period for the players, so it has for coaches like Adamson, who represented Scotland at age-grade level. But the real challenge will be when pre-season training starts, hopefully in the summer.
“I remember when I broke my shoulder,” he says. “I was out for six months but it took another eight months to get to the level I was. So we will have to be very careful in how we manage the players when they come back. In a normal pre-season you need about eight weeks to prepare, but that is after three months off; we’re talking about 18 months. It will be difficult, almost a reintroduction to rugby, and we must ensure we don’t put too much on them but work back gradually, particularly when it comes to the scrummaging.”
Adamson says that getting his young players fit again will be the first as well as the easiest part; more challenging will be what he describes as “the technical and tactical side, getting the brain up to speed”.
Since Newby retired from playing in 2012, he’s compiled an impressively diverse coaching CV, which includes spells with England Women U20, Wasps U18 and the Coventry senior squad. He therefore has a good knowledge of developing young players. “I think the priority is just getting the kids back to being active every day, getting them fit and healthy. Then we turn to game play, decision-making and skills, of which I would prioritise handling, tackling and footwork.”
In France the challenge has been of a different nature. Schools have remained open this year but there’s no competitive sport in the French educational system, so boys and girls play rugby at their local clubs. Or they did until last
March, when the pandemic led to the abandonment of all rugby competitions at all levels, including the Top 14.
Clubs began training again in the late summer and there were a handful of amateur matches played in the early autumn. Then the second wave arrived and in late October the French federation (FFR) suspended the amateur season indefinitely. Patrick Buisson of the FFR, in charge of amateur rugby, recently admitted: “It’s difficult for us to motivate the clubs… Since 28 October we said to the clubs that we will return on 15 December, then 7 January and so on and so on.”
Since late December some mini-rugby sections have been allowed to train each Saturday provided they follow strict rules that include no physical contact, groups of no more than ten and no access to changing rooms, but the amateur season has now been officially scrapped. Buisson fears that the lack of meaningful rugby for likely 18 months will have dire consequences for the grass-roots game, and predicts a “7-8%” drop in the number of licenced players.
Many of these, believes Pierre
Eymeri, president of Pont-de-Claix RFC in Fédérale Three, will be teenagers. “Two years ago our club entered the national U18 league,” he told MidiOlympique. “When we resume we’ll have around 15 lads who’ll have to
“It’s almost a reintroduction to rugby. We must ensure we don’t put too much
on them but work back gradually”
move up into senior rugby after being deprived of two seasons of junior rugby. We fear an enormous loss of licenced players at this level.”
The challenge to keep young players engaged is greater for clubs than for schools, where pupils have to tune in to online sports lessons. There is no such obligation for the 350 youngsters who play their rugby at Kenilworth RFC. The club’s first XV play in Midlands One
West and in 2019 they won the RFU Intermediate Cup at Twickenham. Up until last March their pitches were teeming each weekend with hundreds of boys and girls playing from U6 to
U17, all dreaming no doubt of one day representing Kenilworth at Twickenham.
“All the age-group coaches have worked really hard in keeping engaged with the children,” says Kerry Kirwan, the club’s mini and juniors chairman. “For the younger ones it’s fun things online, and for the older ones it’s one-to-one coaching sessions. We’ve also made team videos and some of them have uploaded rugby tricks that they’ve mastered. It’s important to keep alive the ethos and the team spirit even if you can’t be together physically.”
Grass-roots rugby in England is starting to take its first steps back and Kenilworth are ready to hit the ground running. “After the first lockdown we had a wonderful team of volunteers who worked really hard to make everything at the club Covid compliant,” explains Kirwan. They had to run risk assessments, re-plot pitches and above all win the confidence of parents and players that it was safe to return. They did. They had their first competitive match, a trial game, in
January. “It finished at 2pm and then at about 3pm we heard we were going back into lockdown.”
While school rugby in
Europe and South Africa has been on hold for the last year, in Australia and New
Zealand there was only short-term disruption when the pandemic erupted last
March. Competitive sport returned by August and has continued since.
The ‘lost’ year leaves the northern hemisphere at a disadvantage but Newby believes it will only be short-term. “If New Zealand U18 were to play England U18 in the summer it would be a no-brainer as to who would win. But the school rugby system in England, in every school, is so well run and resourced that I think we’ll be able to catch up.”
“England’s school rugby system is so well run and resourced that I think we’ll be able to catch up”
Steyn shares this optimism. “I think the elite players will be prepared by the time they compete at senior level and will be on par with the rest of the world,” he explains. “The competitive nature in top sportsmen will ensure that they will be able to compete.”
Probably every club and every team throughout Britain has a tale of lockdown woe, but few are as sad as St John’s U15. They never got the opportunity to contest the final of the National Vase competition. Instead they and their opponents, Northampton School for Boys, were declared the joint winners.
“We celebrated their achievement in school, but this in no way made up for missing the opportunity to play at Twickenham,” says Newby. “The players had spent a year working towards that and it was sadly taken away. The RFU communicated well and was in no way at fault. It was just terrible timing for both schools.”
The name of St John’s has been engraved on the trophy so in that sense they are at least winners; the challenge that rugby faces post-pandemic is how to win back all those millions of youngsters around the world who have been deprived of the sport for months on end.
It’s a challenge for which all of us – administrators, coaches and parents – must pool our resolve and resources to ensure we don’t lose a generation.