The Bahamas beat Cayman on their first game.

Bahamas 21 - 12 Cayman

more updates to follow..

All teams have now been confirmed for the 2009 NACRA Sevens, Mexico City, November 14th & 15th 2009.

Women's Teams:

Mexico (hosts)
Guyana
Cayman Islands
Jamaica
Bahamas
St Lucia

The Women's tournament format is a round robin over two days with each playing each other. On Day 2, the 1st and 2nd placed teams will play off for the overall Championship with additional matches between 3rd and 4th and 5th and 6th.

Men's Teams:

Pool A: Guyana, Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Guadeloupe, Dominican Republic

Pool B: Trinidad & Tobago, Mexico, Barbados, St Lucia

Pool C: Bermuda, Jamaica, Martinique, St Vincent & The Grenadines

Top 3 teams from Pool A and top 2 teams from Pools B and C automatically go through to the Cup knockout competition on Day 2. The 3rd placed teams in Pools B and C play a one off match to decide the remaining 8th team in the Day 2 knockout tournament.

The remaining 5 teams enter a round robin tournament on Day 2.

The 5 highest placed eligible teams will go through to the CACSO Games Sevens to be held in Guyana in July 2010 and the highest ranked eligible Caribbean team will go through to the 2010 Commonwealth games.

Source: NACRA

The Jamaican Rugby League squad, who are set to play USA in the ‘Hotels of Jacksonville.com’ Atlantic Cup clash on 14th November, have come up with a unique method of supplementing the cost of the trip, in what is their first international fixture.

Coach Dean Thomas and the rest of the UK-based players are holding a 12-hour DJ marathon next Saturday, 31st October in Marcia’s restaurant on Chapeltown Road in Leeds, from 9am to 9pm.

Pledges can be made to have meals with members of the squad, spin the records with them or just contribute to what will be an historic match.

Jamaica head coach Dean Thomas said,

“Not all our costs for the game have been covered so we thought music and sport go together really well, All the players are sponsored to supply the sound for the hour and we still have slots available in the morning and late evening"

Supported by the Leeds Rugby Foundation’s ‘Connecting Communities’ project, who will take pledges for the event, there is the chance to have breakfast with Dean Thomas and Ikram Butt, lunch with Des Drummond and a local councillor and tea with Steve Pryce, while the music plays.

Pages: 1 · 2

The Bahamas men's national rugby team has quite a task ahead, with the North American Caribbean Rugby Association (NACRA) Sevens Championships rapidly approaching.

The championships, set for November 14-15 in Mexico City, Mexico, serves as a qualifier for more than three tournaments next year. A win will automatically qualify the Bahamas men's team for the Commonwealth Games, USA Sevens and the Pan American Games. A fifth place finish at this tournament or better will qualify Team Bahamas for the Central American and Caribbean Games.

Director of the Bahamas Rugby Football Union (BRFU) Elystan Miles knows that a lot is at risk for the squad, but is confident that they can win the tournament.

"This is the highest stakes we have every played for," said Miles. "This is the first time that we have ever done it like this, where there are so many different tournaments to qualify for. That is why we are pretty determined to win this. We haven't seen Guyana, Trinidad or Jamaica and these are pretty much the powerhouses in the region. If everyone fires on all cylinders, I think we have a good chance of winning the whole thing. We have some of the best players in the region. Four guys on our team have played on the West Indies team. That is four of the seven so we have an excellent team here.

"The team has been training very hard, but we also know that Guyana is a very tough team to beat. They have been training hard, so has Trinidad and Tobago, but we're in the best shape that we have ever been in, even though I am pretty sure that these other countries are going to be too."

Pages: 1 · 2

Youngsters can be difficult to coach for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is that kids play differently than adults do. They make stuff up and aren't always interested in our linear approach to developing skills and learning how to play the game.

If you give kids 15 minutes with a ball and a hoop and some rope, pretty soon they'll have invented "hoop-string-ball", a cool new sport with a complex set of rules. They'll keep changing the rules as they go and they'll have a blast.

When we try to fit 6 year olds into lines of four to pass back and forth along the line we are restricting that sense of play and creativity. And later we wonder why it's so hard to find a natural decision-maker.

So how do we make use of this creative side of children while running a productive mini-rugby session?

Step one is to determine what we mean by "productive." What are the goals of the session? To build catching and passing skills, evasive running, teamwork? Settle on a goal and you'll soon find that there are many ways to turn it into a game that is both "productive" and FUN.

For example, if you want to teach young people to catch high balls, your methods might include lots of repetitions catching high balls. There are lots of ways for us to make that into games, but what if we delegate the game-making to the players?

Pages: 1 · 2 · 3