Coach’s Corner: Austin Hall

One of my favourite parts in coaching is watching the players create the game they want to play.?˜ We talk about giving ourselves the tools to create and then letting the creations run free.?˜ Some of our creations are junk and we throw them out the next day, but other creations are beautiful and they become part of our team canon.

We have multiple college National Championships.?˜ USA Rugby hosts a spring 15s and spring 7s Championship.?˜ While these dates work for some colleges, the bulk of our college 15s is played in the fall and thereby fall championship winners wait until spring to play in a USA Rugby 15s championship.?˜ That can be a five month wait to play one game and often times the team that qualified is very different personnel-wise than the team that plays in the championship.

The American Collegiate Rugby Association (ACRA) and the National Small College Rugby Organization (NSCRO) are relatively new to the college rugby scene and these groups have offered alternative governance resolutions to college teams facing the ever changing landscape.?˜ ACRA and NSCRO offer their own national championships to all college teams, in addition to those offered by USA Rugby.

The issue of seasonality, essentially when to play each version of the code, is the dominant dividing factor in our college game.?˜ We've made baby steps in the right direction and hopefully we will continue to do so in coming years.

We believe in the importance of transition.?˜ It's a huge part of the game and we practice it all the time.?˜ Transition is generally looked at as attack to defence or deface to attack.

The poetry practice was a transition practice.?˜ I had the players run hard for 2-3 minutes and then right in the middle of what they were doing, I had them stop and one player would read a poem.?˜ We read T.S. Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Stevie Smith, Anais Nin, and many more.?˜ As soon as the poetry reading was finished, we had to snap back into rugby play.?˜ We talked about being able to transition from the physical nature of our game into the mental/spiritual experience of a poem and then back into rugby.?˜ Ultimately, I believe we discovered that the transition was really no transition at all.

There are many good, hard-working rugby coaches in America and I've been fortunate to work with many of them.?˜ I try to learn something from every coach I get to work with, whether that coach is a first year high school coach or a national team coach.?˜ And whether that coach was my high school lacrosse coach or a rugby specific coach.

Specifically to rugby, I think the three greatest coaching influences I've been around are Kevin O'Brien, Ray Cornbill, and Bryn Chivers.

Kevin led USA to the Women's World Cup victory in 1991 and just happened to land in "Smalltown," Vermont, where he was my club coach in 2000.?˜ He was the first coach to suggest to me that in order to be a successful rugby coach, one has to separate themselves from the game from time to time.?˜

Ray is a former US National Team coach on the men's side who delivers a coaching style that I'm partial to.?˜ His ability to describe the impact of a bone-crunching tackle in the most calm and peaceful of ways is to be desired.?˜ While most of my coaches up to that point would work up a sweat and use every four letter word ever imagined to describe the intensity of a big hit, Ray has always been able to do it calmly, and for greater effect.?˜

I had the fortune of working with Bryn on the U-20 WNT for a couple years and he gave me the confidence to truly express who I am as a coach and as a man.?˜ He is responsible for helping me discover the vision I've always believed existed, that rugby is as much of an art as it is a sport.?˜ His delivery, his theatrics, his command of words with impact. All desirable and inspiring qualities.

Again, my opinion only, I worry that we are presently doing too much to homogenise both our players and our coaches.?˜ To me, the beauty of the game is found in variety, the unexpected, the ability to adapt on the fly, the well-rounded, artistic player and coach.?˜ I worry that we're limiting ourselves to pursuing a predominantly structured, A leads to B leads to C approach.?˜ The proof is in the pudding and I sincerely hope I'm wrong in that assessment, for the good of the amazing rugby women we have here in the states.

Title IX is an equality in sport initiative that has helped women's rugby attain varsity status at some universities.?˜ Basically, the legislation requires that a college offer as much sport opportunity for women as they do for men.?˜ In America, many colleges have an American Football team that can have as many as 150 men on the roster.?˜ Since there are no women's sports that have such a large roster, and the legislation requires that women are given equal opportunity, some schools are beginning to recognise the growth of women's rugby as a viable complement to men's football.?˜ Essentially, the ability for women's rugby to attract a large roster of women, and give them opportunity to play, is attractive to non-compliant Title IX schools.?˜ We have seen a handful of varsity women's programmes begin directly because of Title IX, and I believe we will realise a massive growth in the next 2-3 years.