Club Rugby Women’s Rugby representatives get started.

This past week saw several forward moving positive steps including clubs back to training, successful coaching courses and the roll-out of the Women’s Rugby development programme for clubs.

After the call for clubs to nominate Women’s Rugby representatives from all clubs, we hosted our first Club Women’s Champion briefing on Wednesday evening. The online session saw an introduction to more than thirty club reps on the way forward at club level.

The need for this programme was identified after consideration of the need to grow Women’s Rugby at club level. This growth and opportunity model requires that all clubs should have a structure in place to support Women and Girls and with a local Women’s Rugby Champion in place to drive this growth and opportunity for Women and Girls in the area.

We envisage that this programme will allow more Women and Girls to sign up at club level and more clubs with more club activities for Women and Girls in their areas. The greater the commitment the more Women players, managers, coaches and administrators will come through the ranks.

To support our clubs and to bring further awareness to this programme we will be hosting a monthly Women’s Rugby workshop on the first Wednesday of every month. These seminars will look at various ways to increase growth and participation with various experts in attendance. Clubs that still need to appoint a Women’s Rugby Representative can click here to nominate their champions.

This past week saw our DHL WP Rugby u20 squad return to training at the HPC. The squad which excludes the current Varsity Cup players will continue to prepare for the U20 Currie Cup.

Having completed and remained in a state of ready strength and conditioning the squad training includes ball skills. It might seem strange to refer to something as basic as ball skills being part of a training session, but we feel it’s important to highlight these milestones which have seen our members going through the various return to training phases.

Next week will see the roll-out of our Club Leadership series which will see our Members of our Club Rugby Executive Committees participate in various leadership workshops on a fortnightly basis. This series includes various components from the original “Clubwise” and elements such as Club Constitutions, Secretarial Skills, Financial Management, Communication, Meeting management and club policies.

As WP Rugby we feel these Club Leadership skills are vital for all generations of leadership as much of the regulations on sport has changed in the past few years and we must remain current and align to these national sports models.

This week we roll out our Lotto Funding workshop to our club members. It’s vital that our clubs attend this workshop in order to best understand the Lotto application process. Clubs should understand the paper trail and various requirements and that external club funding is vital at all times. Clubs can nominate a delegate to attend the Lotto funding workshop by clicking this link. 

This past weekend saw us complete yet another World Rugby Level 1 for Fifteens course at DHL Newlands with several coaches now qualified to coach rugby at a higher level. We’re thrilled about this uptake and the additional demand to enter the coaching programmes.

This Wednesday sees more than sixty WP Rugby Coaches join our High Performance for coaches workshop with DHL Stormers forward coach Rito Hlungwani invited to look at Attacking and Defence Line-out Theory. Coaches who would still like to sign up can click here.

Following the High-Performance coaching course, our next course will be the Level 1 Strength and Conditioning Course this coming Friday. This course is now fully booked, but we’ll keep you updated as to the next S&C course. To do this course you simply need an active interest in Strength and Conditioning for Rugby. Please don’t forget, as with all World Rugby courses you are required to complete the World Rugby online Covid-19 certification course for coaches before attending.