Texas Youth Rugby Association

Girls Rugby has arrived in TEXAS! This weekend (11-3-2007) Traci and I from Austin and Alena and Leslie from Houston traveled to Dallas to do a girls youth clinic. The event was held at Jesuit High School which has THREE boy’s high school teams and you can take rugby as a course!!!

These boys don’t even know how lucky they are, state of the art facilities to practice at (TURF STADIUM) a coaching staff and playing rugby counts towards their GPA. How freaking awesome is that? So we are trying to slowly start the same thing in Dallas, Austin and Houston.

We had about 12 girls at the clinic and we had them from 9am to 3pm. We started them out easy in the morning with a small sharks and minnow game of touch. After they tagged someone they had to hold hands and start working together to get the rest of the girls. Then we moved into a stretching and dynamic warm up with all the girls. They did well and were excited to be doing something besides static stretching I think.

Then we moved onto pop passing, posting and picking the ball and even ball lines! These girls were like sponges, they soaked up everything we said! After each session we tried to do a question and answer and they were able to answer every question and it was just amazing. Before lunch we decided to get tackling out of the way. We were all a little worried that they would be afraid to this, but they jumped right in! We started on our knees and talked about proper placement of your face, neck, hands shoulders etc. They loved watching us tackle each other and kept asking us to do it again and again.

Then we moved to tackling a tackling bag and they did very well! They were hesitant to use their hands though and we kept emphasizing how important hands are in a tackle. After they mastered the bag I got in a tackle suit and let the girls hit me a couple of time each. We also changed the tackling bag to a rucking pad as they were just hitting and bouncing off me now. We noticed again that they were not using their hands so we introduced the rucking pad so they could grab a leg or shorts or whatever they wanted. Overall I was very satisfied by the tackling progress they made and some of those girls could hit hard!

Then we broke for lunch and had some chatting times with the girls. They were very cute and giggly and were very excited to be learning rugby! They wanted to scrimmage (full on tackle) so badly, but we just didn’t feel safe yet. We still had plenty of rugby to cover, so we decided that if they did well we would do a touch session at the end of the day.

After lunch we worked on scrums and line outs with the girls. We again thought they would be adverse to the “touching” that comes with scrumming and rugby. But those girls dove right in and were giving each other their waistbands and scrumming it up! We were able to put together a full scrum and they even drove the scrum machine a bit! The lineout session was really cute as the girls don’t have very much upper body strength yet. Alena and Traci tried to choose the smallest girls for lifting and taught everyone how to lift. At the end they lifted each girl so they could feel what it felt like to be lifted properly. It was very cute!

Next we worked on more ball lines with switches (they picked it up FAST!), looping and crashes. Everything we did was oriented to be a pop pass as we did not think teaching a spin pass would be good on the first day. This is more of an advanced skill and can take some players years to develop. From there we moved to a quick defensive drill, drumming into their heads that rugby defense is together, flat and harder than it looks. This was a short drill as we were running out of time, so we quickly did that and then we moved into the touch drill.

We knew the touch game would be hard to do, so we decided to make it as simple as possible. Alena and I played scrumhalves for the teams after we had split them up and strictly held ourselves to directing and not trying to show off! We had several stoppages over the hour we played touch, some for directions, some for questions…and some for stopping dangerous play.

The touch quickly improved as we introduced more concepts and encouraged them to take the tag and to move quickly into position. They had problems with aligning correctly and at the right distance, so we made sure to encourage those that were doing it right.

The clinic was a huge success and the girls were very cute at the end because they did a cheer for us! Union Rugby and the Rugby Foundation had donated balls, so each girl was able to take a rugby ball and a tshirt home! How exciting!

Traci and I are looking forward to hosting our clinic in Austin on Dec 1st and helping Alena & Leslie with their clinic in Houston on Dec. 15. Stay tuned for flyers, details etc on those camps.

For more information please email the us @ girlsrugbytx@gmail.com.