Heavensgame is a new site that studies rugby's structural issues, treating them from a range of perspectives.
Published by Jeremy Benyon, a Welsh-born banker/financier living in Australia, the site has a cosmopolitan, eclectic feel to it as contributors hail from various places. (I have been asked to write a couple of stories, most recently on American high schools.) Check Heavensgame out here.
A recent interview with USA women's U20 coach Bryn Chivers (not by me) underlines a conventional, or Commonwealth-inspired, view of America.
While the program staff works hard to attend high school, college and U19 tournaments, they still only see a small fraction of the talented players that they know must be out there. Chivers and his staff are constantly running camps across the US but he feels that they are not going to find the best players until the coaches take the initiative to promote the camps to their players.
And again:
The players live considerable distances away from each other, so evaluation presents its own challenges.
While the story accurately outlines the state of affairs, I think it misses the heart of America's promise. The great hope lies not in that there are so many players, and the chief problem is not in selecting the right ones. It is that there are so many talented athletes who could be first-class rugby players, but are not trained according to the best standards of American sports.
As I have not met Bryn, I could not say whether the article's takeaway is that of the author or the subject, who is Welsh-born. Since we know that some of America's greatest coaches have been foreign-born innovators, his background is hardly determinative of his worldview.
More important, our 'best and brightest' have understood both how to identify talent and how to bring America's domestic resources to bear. Although it better addresses a slightly different aspect of coaching's continuum, the old saying remains enlightening: good coaches coach, great coaches recruit.
Comments