Meeting in Cape Town – From April 18th to 22sd, Cape Town hosted two Rugby Africa workshops. As usual the mother city gave a warm welcome to delegates coming from all over Africa : Madagascar, Namibia, Uganda, Senegal, Tunisia and Kenya were represented.
The first part (18th to 20th) of the workshop involved NTDs of Madagascar, Uganda, Tunisia, Kenya and Namibia Rugby Union. Then (20th to 22nd) Training Managers of Senegal, Madagascar, Namibia, Uganda and Tunisia came on stage.
It wasn’t the first time for Cape Town which has become a master in the art of hosting African rugby events. As always the South African Rugby Union had been a precious support while organizing and planning the conference. In addition, delegates had been invited to a diner with Mervin Green, Rugby Africa’s general secretary.
Debates were led by Morgan Buckley from World Rugby and Adama Bakhoum, Rugby Africa’s Regional Training Manager. Experts from SARU were also involved and made some very valuable inputs to discussions : Justin Durant gave a clear expose on how the science could serve sport and in particular high level performance, Morney Nortier presented the brand new information system which had been developed by SARU’s experts and explained how to process and use data in a Rugby union, eventually Steph Nel described the pathway to develop a player.
Those two training session were part of a global initiative which started last year and aims to work with same delegates on a long term perspective. For that session goals were :
- To assist member unions in becoming high performance sporting organisations by providing delegates with tools and best practice examples to implement game development programmes
- To review and update the union development plan including: participation framework, progression player pathways, coaching, competition and talent identification model and systems.
- To allow delegates understand how the game is developing in their own union and other unions and share examples and best practice ideas and information.
