First training session

The first session of the new season started well with 16 children turning up in what ended in a very wet session. Two new additions to the squad in Scotty and George, we do hope that they will return next week.

Tony, Nick and I had discussed what we wanted to achieve in the first half of the season and all agreed that passing in to space away from the “crowd” would be good to achieve. With this in mind we headed down to our new pitch.

We started of with a warm up led by Nick and then a quick chat with parents and children together. The new rules were discussed and the children were all very excited about the new rule that allowed diving over the line (more later) we also talked about respect and Pulborough’s ability to always play well and as a team. Win lose or draw we want to have fun.

After the obligatory game of bull dog and catch, run, score try game we tried a passing drill. This was new to the children. It went very well. I was very pleased to say that they all picked this up very quickly and were able to get the ball to the end of the line, without dropping it in the majority of occasions. This bowed well for the game.

We then tried a bit of Ashton-esque try scoring under the watch full eye of Matthew, Bertie’s father. Some spectacular diving was seen with nearly all being scored 10 out of 10. Apart from Bertie who we all felt was treated rather harshly by his father and only scored 9.5!

Random teams were picked and orange bibs handed out. The rain was now pretty steady but all still with big smiles and full of energy.

Mr T was the ref and decided, rightly so, that he would enforce all rules from the start. A great game ensued and I was personally very pleased to see some great passing out to the wings thus clearing out the ball from the crowd and enabling others to score tries. All of the coaches were pleasantly surprised that during the summer none of the skills we tried to teach them last year had been lost. Well done to all children.

Areas we still need to work on are the chatter during the match. I don’t mean the calls to pass or the encouragement to each other, more the slight disagreements as to who should start with the ball, who will run, who should have run etc! The chatter to the ref, to the coach and to each other, while we are doing this the other teams are setting up and getting ready to run past us. We will be working on this over the coming weeks.

Thanks to all the parents who stood for an hour and a half in the rain. See you next week.

Gavin