{"id":2525,"date":"2016-12-11T09:14:20","date_gmt":"2016-12-10T22:14:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/roosrugby.com.au\/rugbyclub\/?p=2525"},"modified":"2016-12-11T19:04:57","modified_gmt":"2016-12-11T08:04:57","slug":"from-the-manly-roos-to-the-wallabies-and-olympic-sevens-glory-smh-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roosrugby.com.au\/rugbyclub\/2016\/12\/from-the-manly-roos-to-the-wallabies-and-olympic-sevens-glory-smh-story\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Manly Roos to the Wallabies and Olympic sevens glory: SMH Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Link To Roos’ SMH Story<\/a><\/p>\n

The Manly Roos had another successful Primary School Gala day on Friday – with over 50 eager boys and girls coming to have fun and learn the basic of Minis Rugby. Read the write up in the Sydney Morning Herald. \u00a0Photo Credit; Christopher Pearce, Karen Watson<\/p>\n

Full Story: (thanks to SMH)<\/p>\n

A grassroots rebellion is brewing among Sydney rugby clubs and it threatens the future of the game.<\/p>\n

On Friday afternoon at Lane Cove and Manly, more than 400 children swarmed two parks in the name of rugby \u2013 and a free sausage sandwich.<\/p>\n

At Keirle Park about 100 fiveyear-olds were drawn from four schools in the area \u2013 three public and one Catholic \u2013 after a term-long program gave them their first taste of rugby. Waratahs stars and local heroes Cam Clark and Matt Lucas were there, too, plus a small army of Manly Roos volunteers, willing to herd cats for two hours \u2013 as one club official put it \u2013 if it meant converting them to lifelong lovers and players of the game they play in heaven.<\/p>\n

The Keirle Park kids, plus the 300-odd who packed out Blackman Park in Lane Cove, are at the forefront of a push into new territories for Australian rugby. Split evenly between boys and girls, they are the tiny flicker of hope the Australian and NSW rugby unions are desperate to fan and grow through new programs called easily marketable things such as \u2018\u2018Game On\u2019\u2019 (for primary school students) and \u2018\u2018Viva7s\u2019\u2019 (a noncontact version for all ages).<\/p>\n

The people running the programs \u2013 either volunteers or modestly paid development officers \u2013 will tell you they\u2019re working. The first year the Manly Roos and the NSWRU ran Game On it translated to a 20 per cent jump in club registrations the following season.<\/p>\n

And yet a cold war further up the food chain between the ARU and Shute Shield clubs threatens to snuff out these flickers of progress across the state and damage the code for generations to come.<\/p>\n

\u2018\u2018We don\u2019t see the need to play any particularly prominent role with the ARU; they\u2019ve developed their strategic plan for their game, and that is a plan which focuses almost universally on elite and professional rugby, and that\u2019s where the vast majority of the money is going,\u2019\u2019 newly elected Sydney Rugby Union president David Begg said on Wednesday in response to a question from Fairfax Media about the relationship between the premier clubs and head office. \u2018\u2018From our perspective, we see a significant degree of autonomy coming from that and we\u2019re going to make the most of that autonomy.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

It is a coolly detached statement that should have sent chills down the spine of ARU chief Bill Pulver and chairman Cameron Clyne.<\/p>\n

Begg\u2019s words are just the beginning. Within a week or so, the SRU will announce a 2017 Shute Shield draw that pits its grand final, attended by 12,000 fans this year and broadcast live on free-to-air television, against the opening round of the National Rugby Championship, the ARU\u2019s third-tier competition, on Fox Sports.<\/p>\n

The calendar change is a pointed reclamation of cherished territory by the premier rugby clubs, who had watched their season progressively eaten into by the NRC.<\/p>\n

Begg stressed he was not an NRC detractor, nor did he want to pick a fight with the ARU. But with trenchant ARU critic Brett Papworth as his vice-president, the message is clear: having been forcibly liberated from the ARU funding trough, the clubs are taking their new-found freedom seriously.<\/p>\n

\u2018\u2018It\u2019s fair to say the game is not in rude health,\u2019\u2019 Begg said. \u2018\u2018The game has some pockets of great growth: it\u2019s doing really well in country NSW, obviously the women\u2019s sevens [success] was a great boon to women\u2019s rugby and to the whole rugby community in Australia.<\/p>\n

\u2018\u2018However, we view the Shute Shield as still being the breadbasket of Australian rugby. If you look at player development, at Wallabies playing in run-on sides, and you add the Brisbane club competition to the Shute Shield, we still contribute to the development of nearly every Wallaby. Our health, in part, must be a barometer of the health of Australian rugby more generally.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Pulver maintains he is a rusted-on club rugby supporter who, through the ARU\u2019s strategic plan and programs such as Game One and Viva7s, is giving the clubs the chance to grab a foothold in Australia\u2019s fractured new sporting landscape, in which fewer and fewer people are interested in playing structured team sports.<\/p>\n

\u2018\u2018The best way to change the economics of our game is to grow participation and, ultimately, to grow the game you have to bring kids between the ages of seven and 14 into the game,\u2019\u2019 Pulver said.<\/p>\n

\u2018\u2018The average rugby participant spends roughly $1000 a year on the game, through registration, memberships at their Super Rugby club, buying tickets to Test matches, or merchandise and new gear. Girls bring in the same $1000 that boys bring in. Growth there is the key. Then at the other end, if you can create successful national teams, that helps grow participation as well.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Pulver and his strategists are correct. There isn\u2019t a major code in Australia that isn\u2019t targeting girls at grassroots level or looking seriously at providing a professional pathway at the other end. In the latter category, the ARU is leading the charge with a year-round professional women\u2019s sevens program and an Olympic gold medal-winning national team to boot. Rugby\u2019s offering to girls who want to play footy for a living \u2013 an international sevens circuit and the chance to go the Olympics \u2013 puts the AFL\u2019s trumpeted seven-game competition to shame.<\/p>\n

The ARU\u2019s problem \u2013 and it\u2019s a big one \u2013 is that no one is listening any more. Pulver took care of that in January when he declared to club presidents: \u2018\u2018I\u2019m not making any money available for the Sydney clubs to piss it up against the wall.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

He was referring specifically to the practice of paying players that was rampant at the time among the amateur Shute Shield clubs. His principles might have been in the right place, but his comments were the final straw for clubs already bristling at the prospect of life without albeit limited direct ARU funding. A near-complete absence of references to the Shute Shield in the strategic plan released a few months later compounded their humiliation.<\/p>\n

Now, with Begg and a new generation of club presidents in charge at the SRU, an easing of the strained relationship seems unlikely. And it could kill the game just as ARU strategists might have picked a winner.<\/p>\n

Why? Because strategy is useless if Pulver can\u2019t generate the good will to execute it among the clubs and state unions. After all, it was Manly Roos mums and dads who went to those four local schools and convinced them to choose rugby over every other code their year 1 students could have played this term. They went armed with an ARU product, to be run on the ground by NSWRU development officers and funded by the Australian Sports Commission under the Sporting Schools banner. It was volunteers, who have nothing to \u2018\u2018piss up against a wall\u2019\u2019, who pulled it all together.<\/p>\n

Then, if the boys and girls who join the Manly Roos next season do fall for rugby and dream of becoming Wallabies, Waratahs and Olympic champion Pearls, they will need senior clubs to play for.<\/p>\n

The ARU must add some emotional intelligence to its strategy, which is why a cold war is the worst possible outcome for rugby.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Link To Roos’ SMH Story The Manly Roos had another successful Primary School Gala day on Friday – with over 50 eager boys and girls coming to have fun and learn the basic of Minis Rugby. Read the write up in the Sydney Morning Herald. \u00a0Photo Credit; Christopher Pearce, Karen Watson Full Story: (thanks to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2535,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,13],"tags":[18,19],"class_list":["post-2525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","category-minis-rugby","tag-roos","tag-rugby"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roosrugby.com.au\/rugbyclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roosrugby.com.au\/rugbyclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roosrugby.com.au\/rugbyclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roosrugby.com.au\/rugbyclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roosrugby.com.au\/rugbyclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2525"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/roosrugby.com.au\/rugbyclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2537,"href":"https:\/\/roosrugby.com.au\/rugbyclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2525\/revisions\/2537"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roosrugby.com.au\/rugbyclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roosrugby.com.au\/rugbyclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roosrugby.com.au\/rugbyclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roosrugby.com.au\/rugbyclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}