Rugby Time

A major feature of my school week this term is rugby, out on the school playing fields, come rain or shine, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons (for training) and Saturday afternoons (when we usually have our fixtures). For the past two years, I have been coaching the U15C team (pictured above, after a recent hard-won victory). It’s a role I’ve enjoyed, even as I’ve struggled at times with travel sickness on trips to away games. My own brief career as a rugby player ended at 16, up until which point I’d played as a flanker for my own school team. Twenty years later, I’ve discovered that coaching the game is not just fun, but a good learning opportunity too.

Sociologists of sport suggest that team sporting contests play out in microcosm the dynamics of war between the competing participants. Team sport can thus be conceived as a training in soldiery – the quip that ‘the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’ being just one well-known illustration of the point.

The Victorian schoolmasters who oversaw the introduction of large-scale team sporting contests into the timetables of their public schools appreciated this. But, for many of them, there was a good deal more at stake in team sports than the development of reliable soldiers for the British empire. Participation in a sport such as rugby was widely thought also to offer an education in ‘character’ – an elusive but cardinal nineteenth century British virtue. Something of this ethos, albeit in a transmuted form, lives on in my own twenty first century training sessions and match days out on the rugby field.

Rugby time is not just an opportunity for the boys I teach to do some exercise, but to develop some understanding of rugby tactics and strategy, while mastering the basic skills needed to play the game. Linked to these is the question of teamwork (an echo, perhaps, of the Victorian esprit de corps) – and this is where I think the meat of the matter vis a vis ‘character’ really lies.

For teamwork involves appreciating one’s role and responsibility as an individual within a group, while being realistic about what you have to offer in terms of skills, accepting what you need to do in terms of duties, and appreciating what you are reliant on others for. At its heart, then, is the need for a sense of realism but also of recognition. Team members must recognise that no one can stand apart as an island (if things are going to work well for the team), and to recognise also that everyone in the team has something of value to bring to the table. Sometimes, this might involve the humble recognition that others have more to offer than you do in a particular area. Always it is about learning to see and to trust the good in others. Meanwhile, learning to appreciate that your own desire for personal glory should only be realised if it best serves the interests of the group is, for some boys, a challenging (not to say ongoing) experience.

On match days, I try to ensure that victories are an occasion not just for congratulation but for calm and constructive feedback. There’s plenty of scope for improvement in an U15C team, just as there is in most teams: matches aren’t just about getting the win – they are an opportunity to learn and reflect. Equally, I aim to offer equanimity in the face of defeat (admittedly there haven’t been many of those this season!): defeats usually happen because of a mis-match of quality or some bad luck. Best to appreciate this as objectively as possible, calmly learn from the experience, and move on.

Even if the Victorian language of ‘character’ no longer comes naturally to many, then, it seems clear to me that the psychological and educational benefits of participation in team sport still matter. It’s a privilege of my working week to try to foster these.