If he's super league quality there's hope for us all!

A well thought out and considered post vasty - has someone hacked your RL Fans account?

For what it's worth, I totally agree with your points about jr rugby in this country - from my limited experience, it's very colloquial and does little to promote a culture where kids of all sizes and abilities are encouraged to express themselves. Added to that, the shameful behaviour of some coaches and parents makes many jr games singularly unedifying experiences.

Not sure what the solution is, but if there is one, it probably needs to start at jr level and will take at least a generation to have any impact on the game at national level.

Nice post Vasty

The Australians didn't invent the junior/senior sports model they adhere to, it is in fact an adaptation of the old eastern block model used by the former USSR & East Germany. It has been adopted by China amongst other countries some of which focus quite brutally on certain elements of the model.

The Australians began experimenting with this system about 40 years ago and eventually adopted it nationwide through their schools curriculum. One of their most influential decisions was to hire coaches from the most successful Olympic Nations across a variety of sports disciplines, the AIS is the modern day representation of this system.

About 7 years ago UK Sport began experimenting with this system with the goal of producing Olympic athletes for 2012. Children across the country were taken into specific training programmes after being physically, mentally and biomechanically assessed. A child who might have been a 100mtr sprinter may well have shown up as being genetically predisposition to be better suited to indoor cycling and will have been taken into that development programme.

This type of specificity is now becoming part of our curriculum with newly qualified PE teachers being well versed in how this system works. This is exactly where and how the system needs to be implemented and the more it happens the better educated in game awareness our young sportsmen will be.

What we need is a saturation of Physical Education teachers who understand the ideosyncrosies of these methods and then every schoolchild both primary and secondary will be exposed to a multitude of sports, assessed for certain characteristics and then encouraged to participate in those sports for which they show a predisposition.

Beyond school we need all sports to adopt the same system, UKCC is helping to bring some uniformity to the coaching industries, Gymnastics has unsurprisingly led the way.

If the RFL can reach schools all over the country it is not beyond imagination that we could begin to recognise more children with the correct genetics, physiology and biomechanic mix to become elite at our sport, the earlier the better. That alone is not enough, we then need amateur clubs to adhere to a coaching ethos which runs from the very earliest age groups right through to open age. That ethos must dovetail with the schools curriculum or what we will have is one system working against the other with the athlete caught in between. If we can achieve all of the above producing Rugby League players capable of becoming Elite athletes within the sport becomes a matter of numbers.

Of course we also require the professional game to continue the athletes education and that might be more problematic than first considerations might suggest. Too many incumbent coaches are not qualified in terms of specificity, motor skills development, biomechanics, physiology, psychology, nutrition and all of the other sport sciences that 21st century Elite Athletes require if they are to compete internationally.

Yes, they can employ staff as conditioners, defence coaches, nutritionalists etc but if they do not have a grasp of the discplines and sciences involved they will never understand how to effectively apply the advice and feedback being provided to them.

I come from an era of the sport where sometimes a basket with 15 shirts was left in a dressing room, we were told to get stripped, swig from a sherry bottle, get out on the pitch and knock the stuffing out of your opposite number. An extreme example I know but that did once happen while I was a player at Trinity. My point is that individuals may think that their lifetime in the sport and years as player or coach is enough and help from sport science isn't required or wanted, THEY ARE WRONG!

If we don't become unified under a system similar to that which I've described then we will never produce enough players to offer us a depth of talent to rival Australa. We might one day put 13 players on a pitch who can win a series but it will be short lived as without a system to produce players year in year out it will be a matter of time before the next generation surpass our 13 gifted players and we become 2nd or 3rd rate again.

I agree with Vastman that such systems have been easier to implement in Australia and as I said they introduced it 40 years ago and we all know what that's had on our ability to beat them, coincidence? I think not.

FML