Canadian Rugby Forums » General Discussion

BC Rugby News Questions Rugby Canada 7's

(1 post)

  1. Ad Bot

    Posted 1 year ago

  2. Frank
    Member

    Check it out:

    The pools for the first iRB Sevens event were announced this past week.

    As suspected last year’s champion Manu Samoa is ranked first heading up Pool A and hosts Kenya, Wales and the Arabian Gulf on the first day of the tournament.

    New Zealand leads off Pool B with Australia and Fiji ranked at the top of Pool C & Pool D respectively.

    Regardless – for supporters of the short game here at home the pool assignments make for a hard read with Canada’s name missing again from the tournament.

    Canada has always had good connections and long term friendships in Dubai – the head of Emirates Airlines has been a huge supporter of our national team over the years as an example.

    The Americans are ranked 10th in Pool B with invited Zimbabwe, plus regular core teams Argentina and New Zealand.

    With some surprise - France still manages to be a member of the iBB Sevens circuit despite not earning a single point last season – in fact their performances have been on a continual slide over the last few years.

    They had 8 overall points by the end of the season in 2008-9, another 8 points in both 2007-8 and 2006-7 – but despite this they managed to get past us when the math was done at season’s end.

    Math aside – our first start in the iRB Sevens this year will be in Wellington, NZ in early February 2011. And then the following weekend a return trip to sin city in Nevada.

    The Dubai pools hold few surprises – all the core members are lined up and invitations have been handed out to Zimbabwe, Russia and Portugal – plus hosts Arabian Gulf who are ranked dead last and have yet to win a point in the modern series.

    So if all this sounds a bit like sour grapes you wouldn’t be far off the mark – but the reality is that you get what you deserve when the situation away from the field is chaotic and we leave our best resource (the players) out in a Manitoba winter without any direction or a plan worth considering.

    And looking for answers as to what will happen next so we can regain our lost posture on the iRB circuit is no easy task – there is literally no information available.

    Both former coaches (Thompson & Williams) had a plan to regain our loss moving forward and no doubt the present coach should have a yearly plan as well but now even his name doesn’t appear on the website – left to hold the website fort is a manager. What does that mean?

    For the women - there is notice via email that there will be a sevens trial/camp in January with a trip to the Hong Kong in the offering.

    Is this going to be another pay-to-play challenge for parents and players alike?

    OTP (Own the Podium) will send the union some money by all accounts and there was an announcement that some of that money will be directed into the women’s program – but where and in what format?

    Vague statements by union officials are simply meaningless and they are made with no assurance of trust by the membership - and we are left wondering what it all means for our players.

    Requests for funding breakdowns as it directly relates to the players in both Sevens programs has never been provided going back well before the Custom House sponsorship deal - and one has to wonder why it is so hard for the office rugby-crats to put up a spreadsheet on the website or even at the AGM where bingo financing rules the roost.

    Here’s a delicate sample of recent statements:
    "Two-thirds of that money is focused on developing a better structure for women's rugby and enhancing the women's rugby platform. Part of this money has allowed us to enhance our competition structure."
    "What it's saying to me is that there is funding that will be allocated to allow you to begin the process of building the program to be at an Olympic standard."
    "We feel we've got the right high-performance coaching in place, with support from this money that has been allocated, and now we feel we can focus on providing our athletes with the best opportunities starting in 2011 through the qualification which will conclude in 2015."
    "A focus will be on the women's side, which has received far less support than the men's team due to the way much of its sponsorship money has been targeted. The women's team will now be sent to take part in the Hong Kong Sevens tournament next February or March."

    Immediate questions arise:
    Namely – what does “better structure” translate into?
    “Enhancing the women’s platform” … means what exactly?
    “Competition structure” is another beauty… where’s the plan or details?

    Meanwhile the only thing certain on our horizon is that the men will attend the NZ Sevens at Wellington in early February – where someone else is footing the bill.

    Posted 1 year ago #

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.