(Randall S Mar photo)

My guess is that this is a reasonably accurate estimate.

I would think that the numbers are higher in college and high school as some first time players may CIPP and then stop playing after a few training sessions.

For the purposes of this discussion, we will take those people out of the equation and just call them, free money.

I was speaking to Dan Payne and he said something that made sense, “We can keep them if we set expectations for them. For instance, people in our parents’ generation whose parents went to college, were more likely to go to college because not attending college was never an option. It was expected of you from a young age to go to college and they generally did.”

How does this affect coaching? Well, if you coach a youth team, it is smart to try and link the kids to a U-19 or a HS team in the area so that they could continue to play. If you coach a HS team, it would be smart to try and link the kids with playing in college as well as introducing them to local men’s rugby, so that they see that this is a game that can be played for a long time.

If you coach a college team, it is important to make sure that your players know that there are rugby opportunities available in the men’s game. If you coach a men’s team, it is imperative that you keep the pipeline of players coming to your club. It is up to each of us to get it right. Recruit or die.

The two key spots here are the transition from HS to college and from college to men. NYAC has a very strange transition from HS to men as Mike Tolkin and I work with both Xavier HS and NYAC. What happened with Xavier is that many of the kids would leave Xavier and go to booze bag teams and come back fat and incompetent, and that meant that they were too embarrassed to try and play for NYAC or anyone else.

What we started doing is encouraging the kids to go to better rugby programs and to look at colleges based on the quality of the rugby program and to attempt to play any rep rugby to be exposed to it all. When those players came back, they had the confidence to play for NYAC and now we have a decent pipeline of talent that will only get better.

The reason that the pipeline will improve is that we expect that the players make rugby a major consideration when choosing a college. It is important that the college rugby program have stability in coaching and management as that is the key to the long-term success of a program according to Penn State’s Fraser Grigor.

I wholeheartedly agree. Not every player will be good enough to play for Penn State or St Mary’s, but there are programs out there with good stability in the coaching staffs to make it attractive for second tier players that will keep them enjoying rugby longer.

Transitioning from college to men is the same, you must have the expectation that your players keep at it, whether they play for their medical school, business school, local men’s team or Super League side, rugby needs our players to continue on. We want them to play until they are 28-35 years old and stay with it, because if they do, they will coach youth and HS programs and have the expectations of their kids and their kids’ friends to play and to enjoy this as much as we all do.

Finally, it is not only great players that we need, we need administrators. I would say that getting a guy who can play thirds and be a quality club president for five years is just as valuable as getting a good flanker.

There is a place in the game for everyone, we just need to give them the guidance and have the expectations that they keep at it and enjoy it for their lifetime, it is a game that you can be involved with for life and clubs are our lifeblood.