Coaches perspective on the positional demands of school boy (u18/u19) rugby players during a 70-minute match

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Rugby union has been one of the team sports that has grown over the last few years, and the margin between success and failure for teams has become narrower as the years have gone by. The game consists of players going through different movements such as sprints and/or collisions, that vary in intensity. The demands that face schoolboy rugby players are not well understood, and the lack of research in this area leads to a potential lack of understanding of the perceptions that coaches have about the demands that schoolboys are faced with during a match. OBJECTIVE: Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the perceptions that the schoolboy rugby coaches had surrounding the demands that their players are faced with during a 70-minute match. There were a few secondary purposes of the study, such as determining which school, government or private, had a better understanding or perception of the demands, as well as comparing strength and conditioning coaches' perceptions to regular coaches' perceptions. METHODS: This was a cross-sectional, descriptive study to determine the coach's perceptions. These perceptions were collected through an online questionnaire, which consisted of ten sections and 74 questions. The questionnaire was piloted on a subject group with different types of experience. Coaches from the top 100 schools list were contacted through their school website. RESULTS: The questionnaire had a 72% response rate: 41 responses from 51 emails. The 41 responses consisted of 23 government schools and 18 private schools, which included 11 of the top 20 rugby schools in South Africa, with most responses coming from the Eastern Cape (41.5%). Results indicated that a government school's coaches had significantly (p<0.05) more experience than private schools' coaches, and that they had significantly (p<0.05) better academic qualifications than private schools. However, strength and conditioning coaches had significantly (p<0.01) better academic qualifications than coach, whereas coaches had significantly (p<0.01) better coaching qualifications than strength and conditioning coaches. CONCLUSION: "Experience has been shown to be a potential reason for what is described as a good coach" . This is also another potential reason why government schools are a dominant force in schoolboy rugby in South Africa. However, this is also coupled with better qualifications showing the dual importance of both experience and education. This study has shown that coaches, within a South African cohort, overall had good general perception of the demands of school level rugby matches.