How to devise effective rugby coaching strategies
Follow these tips to focus your rugby coaching and make the best use of your time, resources and players' skills.
1. Identify your strengths and weaknesses
Look at your individual players, units, and the team. What are they good at? What do they do well? What do they do less well?
A simple chart could be drawn showing your players' rugby skills with the ball, without the ball and in contact. Be positive but realistic. Ambitions for a side must be achievable, otherwise the players will be become demotivated.
2. Winning the ball
How are you going to get the ball out of the grasp of the opposition? Will the team tackle aggressively, compete at every scrum and lineout?
Decisions will need to be made about how many players should commit to rucks. Some sides will only have two players in a ruck then spread the defence out, waiting for their opponents to either make a mistake or kick the ball away.
The more intelligent the side is, the more sophisticated the defence can be.
3. Keeping the ball
What is the team going to do in the contact situation? How are you best at retaining possession? The choice in this situation is to ruck or maul.
The best teams can do both, but with limited time to practise it is important to be able to do at least one very well. It is simpler to ruck than maul, but the latter will suit bigger sides.
4. Using the ball
How are you going to recycle the ball and play through the phases? First, think set piece. How are we going to go forward from scrums and lineouts? What back row moves have you perfected? Do you catch and drive from the lineout? Will you always move the ball wide early?
Then think broken play. What attack patterns suit our team?
5. Selling the strategy
Once you have formulated your rugby team's strategy, you will need to convince your fellow coaches and the players about it. Here are a couple of good tips on how to sell your plan:
- Make sure you talk to the key personalities first and get them on your side.
- Have a team meeting and make the players devise the strategy, with your guidance, of course. This has the advantage of sharing the responsibility.
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