It was early evening on Tuesday August 3rd at Amity High School, and on one of the sports ovals, the canine playing members of Amity Regional Rugby Football Club, or Amity Regional RFC, were in pre-season training mode.

 

Head coach Reede had got his 30 players to warm themselves up with a game of touch football for the first 10 minutes before he called them over to speak about the training session:

 

“Alright, everyone; listen up!” Reede spoke aloud so that the whole team could hear. “Welcome to the first pre-season training session. It is great to see you all here on this first day. Now, in this week’s sessions we will start on the basics. You will all be working on the fundamental elements of rugby, which is basically everything that we covered on the day of the tryouts. Again these will include tackling, running, rucking, lineouts, passing, scrumming, and set-plays. I want you all to become familiar with your basic skills so that you will be able to play properly but to also then function the more advanced techniques of the game. Every team has their own tricks and style of play to get the better of their opponents, but if the basic fundamentals are not right, they will make too many errors and therefore will never be able to perform their tricks. So let’s get all of our skills right this week and then hopefully it will be easier to create our styles for next week. Clear?”

 

“Yes, coach.” Replied the team.

 

“Okay, then.” Reede continued. “Now every training session we will begin with our touch rugby warm up; as you all just did; and crossover passing, then perform our joint fitness training with Schalk. After that we continue jointly to work on tackling plus attack and defense drills. Then the backs and forwards will split up and perform their methods: The backs will run set plays and the forwards will perform lineouts and scrums. Plus each kicker has to take time out from set plays to practice place-kicking, drop-kicking and punting. Then we will finish with a full semi-contact scrimmage. Again, you should all be familiar with this as we did it in the tryouts.” He then began to slowly raise his voice as he was about to finish and get his players to start training. “So now get into positions for crossover passing and start. Let’s go team! Break off!”

 

And the players broke off from their huddle and got into positions for the warm up passing drill to start pre-season training.

 

For the next two training sessions, the team went through their full training routine that Reede had mentioned; which was performed on the day of the tryouts. All players seemed to almost perfect their basic skills in the game, even though there was always the odd “unforced” error from poor ball handling and occasional ruck infringements such as failing to release the ball or failing to stay on one’s feet while rucking or entering the ruck from the side. But Reede and the assistant coaches knew that these players would slowly develop into unique athletes; otherwise they would not have selected them in the first place.

 

So at the end of Thursday, August 5’s training session; as the players were packing up ready to leave the training ground; The coaches gathered around in private to review their players’ performances for the week:

 

“Alright, then.” Reede began. “The sessions this week have not gone too bad and each player is developing very well. We have only had a few absentees this week due to personal reasons, but overall the team appears to be functioning. They are running hard and fast in the crossovers; no one is giving up or showing too many signs of weakness in the fitness session; attack is hard with enough support at every breakdown; defense is looking solid with players staying on their targeted dog and tackling well without many missed tackles; lineout throws are fast and straight and the receivers have solid pairs of hands; forwards are pushing hard in the scrums and doing well to hold them upright; all the backs are slowly understanding each set play and showing impressive speed in executing them; and even the kicking ability is good, too. However, in the scrimmage, even though everyone is working hard and fast in it, I have noticed several handling errors from a few players; plus we have had to penalise them on some occasions for ruck infringements. This calls for further action. Therefore we are going to spend next week working on ball handling and appropriate rucking techniques. These two objectives is what all of our players need to perfect before we move onto advanced play.”

 

“I get you, Reede.” Alistor responded first. “That said, I think that we should do several running and passing exercises: Crossovers, running and passing in numbers of four, and jogging the length of the field and back with continuous passing. Each error that is made will be punished with push-ups or sit-ups. But I would also encourage each player to come to training early for touch footy to get enough numbers to warm up properly before we start. They can also work on their ball handling and passing there.”

 

Reede nodded in agreement as did the other 2 coaches before Caleb spoke up to propose his objective:

 

“And as for our rucking exercises, we should keep going with the players on the tackling bags in lines of three with the attacking team hitting the bags and clearing the defenders out to keep possession. We should keep a sharp eye on how they are rucking while doing this; because if we notice an infringement such as leaving feet in the ruck or entering from the side, we should again enforce push-ups or sit-ups for each one until they get it right. We should do the same with our game-sense scrimmage: Any infringement that is noticed and stopped by the whistle, the team that commits the offense will be punished with the same thing.”

“Just remember to keep it to five every time they do it.” Schalk added. “We don’t want to fatigue them faster in the middle of drills if it will affect their ability to train properly. We want to keep their endurance rate as good as possible.”

 

“Yes, we can manage that.” Caleb responded.

 

“Alright then, boys.” Reede said, taking in his assistant’s objectives from his goal. “So this is how next week will pan out: We will have the same warm up as per usual: Touch footy for 5 to 10 minutes, then crossovers and four line passing, then fitness exercises, then field-length jogging with continuous passing, then offensive driving and clearing out, then the full scrimmage.”

 

“Alright, let’s do it.” Alistor replied.

 

Caleb and Schalk nodded a reply before Reede concluded:

 

“Okay, then. See you next week. Keep well.”

 

And with that they headed back to the sheds and got ready to pack up their gear to leave the training session while the players did likewise.

 

*

 

The following week starting from Tuesday 10, Reede and the assistants explained the whole weekly schedule that had been spoken about last week to the team after they had finished their warm up touch football game. As they went on, Reede added a few more things:

 

“It might be that using these extra drills in one session could take away time to practice set plays, kicking, lineouts, scrums and defense drills; but don’t worry because we will resume our normal training schedule next week and for every single training session thereafter. But for this week I want us to fix our mistakes in handling, passing and rucking to perfect all of our fundamentals before we introduce more complex parts of the game. Every drop ball, bad pass or ruck infringement that we see will result in push-ups and/or sit-ups until we get it right.”

 

Some players looked at each other a little concerned at the thought of punishment on their bodies for inconsistent play and how it would affect their ability to train, but Scamp was optimistic and seemed to see reason to it.

 

“Just remember, boys,…” He therefore remarked to his father and fellow Ex-JD’s quietly. “…that this is an example of consequences for inconsistency. If we do end up working our bodies so hard to the point of extreme fatigue, that will be our “sentence” for what we have failed to do; and therefore it will give us a reason to work harder to perfect our skills.”

 

The Ex-JD’s took that thought into consideration for a moment, and then nodded in agreement. They always appreciated Scamp’s ability to look beyond the bigger picture.

 

“Now then;…” Reede finished. “…let’s start. Jump to it! Get right into the passing drills, now!”

 

The team then parted to join groups to begin their “fundamental errors repair” work that had been set for them this week.

 

Throughout the two days of the week they performed the exact drills that the coaches had set for them. Sometimes a coach would take certain players aside and show them handy passing and handling techniques to avoid further error on the field; and they would do the same through rucking drills. This helped every player that they came across and the team was slowly showing signs of improvement despite the odd push-ups or sit-ups that was received from errors or infringements, but they were very limited.

 

At the end of the week, Reede praised them for perfecting all fundamentals and he felt that they had earned the right get deeper into the chemistry of the game. This would start

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