Rookie Rugby in Oklahoma

This past weekend, Kurt Weaver from USA rugby came down to Oklahoma to help us grow our Youth Development program within the state. The program in Oklahoma isn’t a great one; however, Kurt coming down to host two different Rookie Rugby clinics in the state has shed light on the hope of youth rugby in Oklahoma.

Rookie Rugby is a non-contact game found in USA Rugby’s Rugby for All development pathway. This game is perfect for children and adolescents who are interested in learning a new sport and becoming fit. Rookie Rugby is mainly about exposing as many people as possible to the sport of rugby. The rules are simple and it’s extremely fun to play! It promotes many different aspects of sportsmanship found across all various types of sports which can prove to be quite useful to parents and children, even if they aren’t going to continue playing rugby.

The first clinic that Kurt held for us was in the Tulsa area on Monday, February 27th. This specific clinic hosted not one, but three separate opportunities for players, coaches and rugby fans to get certified on how to teach kids how to play a safe form of rugby. In Union, he hosted a clinic for both a high school boys’ team and a men’s side from Tulsa. Later in the evening, he hosted another clinic for the Tulsa Women’s Rugby Club at their home pitch. A total of 60 players, coaches and rugby appreciators all got Rookie Rugby certified on Monday. This is a fantastic step in the right direction for rugby in Oklahoma!

On Tuesday, February 28th, Kurt came down to Norman, Oklahoma to host a session for the University of Oklahoma Women’s Rugby Club. We had a blast working with Kurt! We participated in many different skills that we’ll focus on teaching the children. Kurt stressed relay games at the beginning of each session as they actively engage the children and help get their hearts going. He said not to incorporate too many rules in the beginning: we need to remember that we’re going to be teaching ten year-olds how to play the game and their attention spans won’t quite match up to the task of remembering each rule. A way we can combat this is to start out with simple games like keep away and then slowly progress with different games, adding only one rule each time. However, between games we need to be sure to bring the kids in and talk to them so that we’re not overloading them with information. He also brought us a lot of valuable learning tools that we can use as players but if you would like to learn some of them, you should contact him and get Rookie Rugby certified. It’s fun, easy and will allow you to help spread the love of rugby.

Kurt also ran an hour long session for the OU Roses on the breakdown and how to adequately fend in a ruck. It was great for us to learn new ways of doing things on the field. He was thorough and aided us a lot. He covered how to properly place the ball once you go to ground, emphasized to never, never, never allow someone to take you down easily. We learned a lot from Kurt and we will be having him down to Oklahoma later this year for a refereeing session and a coaching session. He’s provided us with a lot of tools for teaching and playing the sport we love.

I highly recommend that anyone interested in coaching young, bright minds to play rugby should look on the Rookie Rugby website, rookierugby.com and contact the Rookie Rugby team. You’ll be surprised with how fun it is and how much you really will learn. Maybe one of the kids you teach will grow up to play for the US in the Olympics: how cool would that be?