Dorian Roach has just returned from an intensive Sevens Coaching course in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His trip was facilitated by the Bahamas Olympic Committee, to whom we are extremely grateful.

Click here to download a PDF of the iRB Sevens Coaching Manual.

Click here to download a PDF of the Rugby Canada Skills Booklet

This is Dorian's Report

Day 1

IRB Rugby Coaching Course 2009, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
I arrived on Tuesday morning and was taken to the hotel. The first day I met a few of the other coaches and we just really hung out all day talking rugby, specifically in our region. The first session started Wednesday morning, a lot of us were surprised as the whole presentation was in Spanish! Fortunately for us, we had Al Caravelli (US Men’s Sevens Head Coach) at our table who speaks fluent Spanish. He translated for us, but also added his comments and opinions which was great. Day one consisted of doing the Level I Coaching which was a non-participating course and dealt with the basics of 7’s rugby. We were also asked to watch videos of Sevens and analyze the teams and their playing patterns.

Day 2

Day Two was the start of Level II Coaching, in which we had to produce session plans for a game in a week for the teams we had analyzed (ours was Australia Men). We then went to the field and had to actual run through our session and coach a drill. We had established that Australia Men had issues which their defensive alignment and transitional play, so our drills were centered around those weakness. My specific drill was a defensive line being led by a sweeper and communication between them. After of field session we went back to the classroom for another presentation by Argentina and their patterns of play.

Day 3

Day Three was also another practical in which we ran another drill using our same team, but the game was to be played in four months. So these sessions were based on individual skill improvement rather than team adjustments. My skill improvement was effective tackling in rugby (tackling the ball as well as the player). We were then interviewed by Scott Harland who is the IRB Educator and he was the one evaluating us. I passed on all the proficiencies that he was looking for, all of us now have to complete a dairy of our training sessions, goals and games over the next 6 weeks in order to complete Level II Coaching.

The Good

I really learned a lot of new drills and game play patterns, especially from Al Caravelli Morgan Williams (Team Canada). I made a lot of great contacts and everyone was willing to share ideas and experiences. I have open invitations to join training camps with USA and Canada. The Argentineans also had some great information as they had not only coaches but players as well in the sessions.

I also got a lot of resources including:

Team Canada’s Seven’s Manual from Morgan Williams
Over 90 Drills from Morgan Williams
Nutritional information from Al Caravelli
Fitness information from Al Caravelli
41 Men’s and Women’s Games from Rugby World Cup in Dubai

The Bad

We only used one page out of the Workbooks, not one page each, one page total! It was a coaching class, but we weren’t really taught how to coach, but we were expected to do it in our practicals. The presentation was in Spanish! We were the luckier of the two English speaking groups as the other translator was terrible!

Thanks to Dorian for this report.