Irish international Kathryn Dane is doing amazing work with tackling and women's rugby. Her latest is a survey looks at how coaches view contact training within the female game.
"in some cases, women played their first rugby match before ever being tackled or making a tackle."
Speaking as a minirugby coach, this terrifies me. Just last week I sent a message to the parents of my P3 team to say that we are starting to build up to contact next season, establishing core skills like falling in a way that minimises injury, promoting balance etc. I will not allow any of my players to go on a field to play contact rugby until they have demonstrated competence in tackling. As I said to one of my fellow coaches, if a parent has a problem with that then a) they want their head examined and b) they can take it up with the academy director because I refuse to do it.
I remember my first game, I wasn’t coached how to tackle. It got assumed that because I was a mad rugby fan I knew how to tackle. I got one practiced full tackle 5 minutes before kick off
We aren't even letting our lot near a tackle bag until they practice the right posture! Am I being cautious? Probably, but I want to develop a team that has a positive and upbeat attitude towards tackling and the best way I can think to do that is to make sure they are bloody good at it - in my experience, if you are good at something, you wind up loving it because you get repeated positive feedback.
(there is also that I want to minimise the risk of injury, which is more important, but I wanted to put the positive "what we want to happen" front and centre because it is too often forgotten about because of the understandable focus on the negative "what we don't want to happen")
I’m a big fan of body posture and positioning, and a big fan of contact activities without tackle shields, there’s loads of fun stuff around body positioning. I am always mindful of my first tackle experience and lack of coaching and never want that for anyone I coach
"in some cases, women played their first rugby match before ever being tackled or making a tackle."
Speaking as a minirugby coach, this terrifies me. Just last week I sent a message to the parents of my P3 team to say that we are starting to build up to contact next season, establishing core skills like falling in a way that minimises injury, promoting balance etc. I will not allow any of my players to go on a field to play contact rugby until they have demonstrated competence in tackling. As I said to one of my fellow coaches, if a parent has a problem with that then a) they want their head examined and b) they can take it up with the academy director because I refuse to do it.
I remember my first game, I wasn’t coached how to tackle. It got assumed that because I was a mad rugby fan I knew how to tackle. I got one practiced full tackle 5 minutes before kick off
We aren't even letting our lot near a tackle bag until they practice the right posture! Am I being cautious? Probably, but I want to develop a team that has a positive and upbeat attitude towards tackling and the best way I can think to do that is to make sure they are bloody good at it - in my experience, if you are good at something, you wind up loving it because you get repeated positive feedback.
(there is also that I want to minimise the risk of injury, which is more important, but I wanted to put the positive "what we want to happen" front and centre because it is too often forgotten about because of the understandable focus on the negative "what we don't want to happen")
I’m a big fan of body posture and positioning, and a big fan of contact activities without tackle shields, there’s loads of fun stuff around body positioning. I am always mindful of my first tackle experience and lack of coaching and never want that for anyone I coach