High School Rugby Questions

[sKosobucki]

I have been with our rugby program from the start, we are only 3 years old and located in South Carolina, USA. Over these past years our team has mainly worked on how the game is played, the rules, and the basics of rugby. While I know that we need to make that knowledge/skill our second nature I feel that our team has suffered in the fitness catagory. Half-way through our season some of our players are still out of shape, pathetic i know. My main question is; what should we be doing as a team to help improve our fitness and endurance? Another thing is we do practice our different line out plays and our switches with out backs. When it comes down to it when playing a high school game, we never use these skills. Are we waisting our time with these drills that help tune these skills we never use in a real game? Any suggestions would be helpful, just try to remember that we are talking about American teenagers with at most 2 years of rugby experience.

 

[Steve-o]

Gay-Guy must be on holiday because he normally jumps on these questions!

I don't have any experience with coaching or fitness training, so I went and googled 'rugby training drills' and these came up:

http://www.netfit.co.uk/rugby-cornwallwen
http://www.betterrugbycoaching.com
http://www.sport-fitness-advisor.com/rugby-training.html
http://usacollegerugby.com/resources/drills

I'll try answer some questions though.
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Another thing is we do practice our different line out plays and our switches with out backs.[/b]

The way I've always trained, forwards and backs did their plays seperately. Makes sense since there will be some hiccups whilst the players learn, so rather do it seperately or time is wasted. For instance if the hooker (number 2) keeps missing his jumper, it would be a waste for the backs to stand and waited for the ball. Rather let the backs refine their plays by themselves, till they can do it at full pace. When all parties have got the plays in order then make it a full team session.

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When it comes down to it when playing a high school game, we never use these skills. Are we waisting our time with these drills that help tune these skills we never use in a real game?[/b]

Highschools games tend to be more fragmented than what you see on the TV, so plays are extremely hard to perform in broken play. Only do plays from set pieces from now on. This should help ten fold. This however will depend on if your players have the basic skills already. Make sure you are not jumping too far ahead. You don't fine tune skills IN plays, they should be there already, plays should just focus those already acquired skills in different ways IMO.
For instance, you finally get the players to perform a play with the ball being passed from left to right. But then when you need to do it from right to left you find out that your flyhalf can't pass to his left accurately!
The skills need to be there already.
But this doesn't mean that you can't work around player weakness! Perhaps you can do a switch ball with the inside/outside centre to get around this.

Be flexible but prepared iron out things that aren't working effectively.

Hope it helps!

 

[Hall]

Focusing on the emboldened sections of your question;

Fitness and conditioning does not necessarily need to be done as a team. Does a prop need the same kind of fitness as a winger? No. So fitness and conditioning drills need to be tailored for individual positions, maybe even individually. Sometimes people need to take responsibility for themselves if they want to be good at Rugby. Obviously a few laps of the pitch and some suicides can be included in training sessions but its pointless having people from different positions doing the same routine all the time.

For the second part, no you aren't wasting your time. But as Steve-o said, try and use them from set pieces where you have a full backline to work with. They are impossible to do from broken play and in that situation its far easier to just give the ball to your most elusive back and let him go (but with support obviously).
But even if you won't get much chance in high school to use them, there will come a time when you can and being familiar with these moves will help you out a lot.