Rugby coaches go scouting at athletics meets

As part of their plan to build rugby Sevens teams that will attempt to qualify for the 2028 Olympics, the sports body has launched what they call a “talent transfer scouting scheme.” Still, at the nascent stage, the scouts from Rugby India led by Sourojit Ghosh have attended two national-level athletics meets so far and narrowed down on about three potential candidates.

Spearheading this ambitious project is the Rugby India federation president and Bollywood star Rahul Bose who is also a former India international. “95 per cent of the athletes in the country don’t make it to the national teams. We are going to try and find athletes who are not going to realisicaly make their national teams in other sports but are very good athletes. If you have explosive power, strength and physical presence that is 40 per cent job done for Sevens rugby,” Bose told The Indian Express.

Although Rugby India has started their talent transfer scouting program with athletics, it will soon look at other sports as well. Venter, who works under the India senior men’s Sevens team coach Ludwiche van Devente, is pleased with the quality of players he has observed so far.

“We have now found this strange placement of certain body types. Taller big people are up north and if we go east we can find smaller people with speed, if you go south you find a little bit of combination. It has been very interesting,” said Venter while shedding light on his observations so far.

Height, speed, fitness

The initial selection process is based on basic parameters such as height, speed and fitness. Kiana Fourie, another South African high-performance coach, feels that average athletes could be trained to become top-class Sevens players.

“You can be an average 200m sprinter and never go to the Asian Games but you can be a top try scorer and fast player in the Sevens team. Athletes that are a little bit taller and bigger in body type. A combination of sprinter and thrower. For Sevens, you want quite a complete athlete because it is a shorter period of time,” said coach Fourie.

The federation is also inviting athletes to write to them at scouting@rugbyindia.in if they meet the basic standards mentioned on the website. While most athletes may pass the initial basic parameters, the selection process is a far more rigorous process. The weeding out will be done in the initial stages itself. Players scouted by this program aren’t guaranteed a spot in the future national teams. They will be inducted into a residential high-performance program and will have to compete in state meets and work their way up.

“So far two names have been isolated in the entire list of 300-odd names. Wherever we go, we will look to sift there and then. If our state officials put 25 athletes out, high performance coaches will evaluate them and weed them out,” says Bose.

This is not the first time rugby has scouted talent from athletics. Back in 2009 about half-a-dozen athletics national campers tried their hands at the sport and few of them represented the country at the 2010 Asian Games as well. Kalyan Chowdhury, who is now India’s chief youth athletics coach, facilitated the transition back then.

“From Sports Authority of India athletics camp, 6-7 people joined rugby. Paul Walsh (a former British diplomat credited for developing rugby in India) came one day to meet me and asked if I could help. I felt they can play rugby in the off-season and can develop courage and strength through the sport,” said Chowdhury.

Sourojit Ghosh, who is now the high-performance general manager, was involved in the 2009 scouting process as well. Ghosh feels athletics is a discipline that is ideal for scouting rugby talent as players of various body types are present. “Rugby is not for one particular body type. Each position requires different strengths. We are here at athletics because it suits our body type and physical requirements needed for the game,” he explained.

But after 2009 rugby hasn’t seen similar scouting programs and the current senior teams are in a transitional phase requiring fresh talent. What sets apart this program from the previous ventures would be its scale and intent.

“This is a crack squad. This squad will be treated like the rugby X-men or X-women team. It is an audacious and ambitious dream and we are far away from it. We already got the dream and intellect and now we have to do the implementation which requires unglamorous, unceasing slogging,” said Bose.