2022 marked the first full year of schoolboy rugby after the two preceding years were cut short by Covid. A highlight of the season proved to be the vulnerability of the ranking topping teams to upsets, something which became a theme of 2022, resulting in an interesting season.
The forgettable part of the same season was the higher number of injuries experienced at the top level of the school game.
The two years of Covid were pointed to as a leading contributor to injuries. For most boys their last proper year of rugby prior to donning on a first team jersey was at under-15 level. So while they had been afforded the opportunities available to develop their bodies using gym workouts and other scientific training methods during the Covid period, a huge chunk of their physical game-time development path had been lost.
You see the important element when looking at a rugby player’s mass is the momentum that they carry when making contact. Momentum is the product of mass (kg) and speed (m/s). In rugby the momentum carried by a player is very high. Players therefore have to be developed to withstand the demands of contact.
Most growing boys naturally become heavier, stronger and faster between adolescence and adulthood. Through scientific sports development, the same teenage boys are able to become unnaturally bigger, more powerful and quicker over the same period of time. This means that an integral part of the longer term young rugby player development is managing how these athletes will be able to tolerate the physicality. There is no better tool of development and measurement of this than live match-play conditions. During live matches players get to ply and improve their general and specific skills while being exposed to more collisions than in training as well as a longer and sometimes higher level of fatigue than in training. As boys move up the age-groups, these levels of intensity increase, so their adaption is based on a year-by-year step-up phase-in.
The bottom-line is there is plenty of merit for the associations between Covid and an increased percentage of schoolboy rugby injuries in all known categories.
However with Covid hopefully being past tense, the 2023 opportunity is to take full cognizance of the fact that schoolboy rugby is evolving. The age-group game feeds off senior rugby and more so than ever before employs professional coaches who have high degrees of exposure to high performance training in the professional arena.
Professor John Fairclough, leading UK orthopaedic specialist said:
“The elite game has changed beyond recognition since professionalism and is no longer the contact sport that many of us grew up watching from the stands.”
“A focus on producing increasingly powerful, fitter, faster and dynamic athletes, has resulted in collisions of extraordinary magnitude. In the elite game players no longer seem coached to evade the opposition but rather to physically dominate them by running into and over them.”
The glamorous / champagne rugby that draws crowds to the sides of school fields every Saturday is still there. It is however gradually being replaced by play that is a lot more concentrated on forward domination, breakdown contesting aggression and defensive awareness achieved through suffocating line-speed. Expect the real estate once readily available to show-ponies and clean-lines runners to increasingly start to lie in areas only accessible by cross-kicks / kick-passes and other lucky bounce tactical kicks, as bigger, stronger, quicker boys coached by experienced pros heavily influenced by what their senior counterparts are doing, turn to big-D in greater doses as the key to winning matches.
In this context of what’s to come, school player management simply has to reach a new level as well. It is imperative now that so much of the concern has shifted to head collisions and how to prevent / reduce these.
The rest periods between school matches will hopefully soon be regulated as will the number of matches that boys are allowed to play over a period of time. This is in line with some of the reforms that World Rugby and national rugby unions are being pressurised to make to the professional game in an effort to make it safer.
One can see the three-day format of Easter Rugby Festivals eventually being prohibited because it is simply too much rugby in too short a space of time. Schools settling on a maximum of 15 full length matches for a season, perhaps less when new research comes out, is another likelihood in the future.
At senior professional level, the introduction of fresh replacements off the bench has also been contested, as it is believed to increase the risk of injury when fresh players collide with fatigued ones.
At school versus school level the use of the squad system, as rare as it is, is frowned upon and prohibited in most regions. It should be officially banned.
However the more serious concern should be for the B-team player who has completed a full match and then has to participate in an A-team match, sometimes the whole game, due to an injury but most often as a tactical substitute. Aside from banning tactical replacements, the efforts made by certain schools to play the 2nd XV (u19B) match before the u16A match and therefore afford those boys who bench for the 1st XV (u19A) at least an extra hour of rest, has to be applauded as a step in the right direction.
Please read:
https://simplifaster.com/articles/development-rugby-players-amateur-high-performance/
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