Back to square one?

Right, well first of all, apologies to everyone for not having posted for a while!  I had a lot of people asking me when I was going to write again!  Well, as most of you probably know by now, Malindi didn’t make it to the provincials for fifteens this year despite high expectations.  This was quite a disappointment for all of us, but to be honest with you it was expected after the poor level of  (especially physical) preparation by the boys this year.

We have been having some issues with this group of players, which was extremely surprising to me, but I’m used to it now!  It seems like this group, especially (and both sadly and ironically) the senior players, feels like it is simply entitled to win and is not willing to put in the extra work necessary to win.  It’s true that there were some unusual circumstances.  The elections created a tricky break just before the “counties” which were generally holidays and the change to 15s in the first term but all the other teams contended with this as well, so this is no excuse.  We seem to have had a ridiculous amount of injuries, and players just didn’t show up to training, especially after particularly physically challenging training sessions.

I really thought we had the motivation part of the equation figured out since we clearly showed the players in past years that intense preparation and commitment equals success and success means traveling and fun.  But somehow we came across a group of boys (many of whom I’m training for the third and fourth years this year) who just don’t want to put that extra effort in and then blame others when they lose!

St George's ready to kill us!

So basically, we showed up to the Counties, thrashed the first team we played (I can’t remember some team from Kilifi) something like 60-0 (all scores reported here are approximate as I can’t remember them anymore! ) and then played St Georges (arguably, like us, perennial favourites now with probably Shimo la tewa and Waa) who were massive!  It is hard for me to believe that most of their pack was under twenty years old (again sorry if I’m wrong, but their pack probably weighed at least twice ours).  We ended up playing quite well against them, held a 6-3 lead for a while after the first half and it looked like we could do quite well, but then our boys eventually ran out of steam and got thrashed I think something like 25-6.  They were basically 3 times fitter than we were, and this was something that I had warned the boys about before the tournament.  For maybe the first time ever in my time coaching however, I wasn’t disappointed with the loss, because St Georges was clearly better than us.  It was somehow soothing! J  Congrats St. Georges!  Their Coach mentioned in passing that they had entered some sort of senior club championship and had benefited greatly form the experience and from a number of friendly games against teams in nearby Machakos which I presume has closer to an up-country rugby culture (can’t be worse than on the coast!).

Malindi High... 

At this point I thought we were out of the tournament but there was a semi final to play, and we played our old rivals Galana.  Galana was not previously a strong rugby school, but pretty much since I started coaching they were bolstered by the arrival of quite an excellent (I think Luya) coach called Odima who had previously raised the bar at rival Barani and then had switched schools.  Apparently Galana had beaten us (while I was away) last year in the 15s district tournament but this year had decided to compete in their own district (Magarini) and not against us in the Malindi Championships… which begs the question, why weren’t their two spots for us in the provincials last year if we were representing two districts? 

Waweru looking crushed

At any rate, we expected Galana to have strong backs and a weak pack, but they were the opposite.  They again were much fitter than us and better disciplied, regardless we held a 3-0 lead into the dying seconds and then somehow a player took a long throw off a lineout, ran through our whole team from half way between midfield and the 22 and scored a try to make it 7-3.  We were crushed.  We showed up to the 3n^rd place game and won that 7-0 against competition that didn’t have enough jerseys or boots… I was very disappointed and said as much to the players after the game.  I reminded them that their goal was to win two games at the nationals, and they had not done enough to make it out of the counties (granted, probably Galana and St Georges and us would have made the top four in the province and if fact, St Georges ended up winning the provincial tournament).  But surely they needed to work much harder if they wanted to achieve what past teams had achieved.  Two years ago our goal was to make it to the nationals and we did and last year it was to win a game at nationals and we did that for the 7s tournament.

The boys training for 7s on their home pitch

We still have the 7s tournament to prepare for, and we are, but the preparations (although slightly improving) are nowhere near where I had hoped they would be.  I am still extremely disappointed because for me, 7s is not rugby and I would prefer that we excelled at 15s, but the boys want another go at it, and I’ve told them that I will only train them if they improve their fitness, and it seems like they have done so.  We have an extremely quick group this year (and many players with varying skills) which lends itself to the sevens game, so you never know, if they learn from their lesson, they might just win the provincials again this year.  I hope so!

Super Chibudu!

On the bright side we have had quite a response from the form 1s and 2s.  Good old Chibudu has been showing up every day to coach them and has been doing a great job motivating them.  So with a bit of luck will have a great new crop to work with next year!  Up Malindi high! :)

Breathing life into Malindi Rugby!

Good new to report!  Malindi Rugby keeps progressing.  We managed to finally get the club thing going, at least nominally.  The boys finally got organized, and a good number of my old players and some from Barani have gotten together and played a couple of friendlies against Malindi High.  This was great for Malindi as they were properly thrashed and egos bruised, showing them that there is much work to do.  The old boys were out of shape, but still have there skills, and are relatively well coached ( J ). If they train at least a couple of  times a week in the next couple of months, I told them we can think of inviting some of the Mombasa teams to play us.  Could be fun!  I love watching Kithi and Simba play again!  ...maybe soon I'll be playing with them!

Lack of focus, commitment and might pull the first team for championships

Have had a bit of a funny week training the boys, on one side quite positive, on the other extremely frustrating.  One of our goals amongst the coaches (especially Waweru and I) was to have 60 guys training with us this year.  Well, we’ve fallen extremely short of that (on good days we have 30), and there are many factors involved the most important of which was that the 15s season got pushed up so much.  Last week, after we squeaked through to the county championships, I asked each of the remaining players to bring two players, especially form ones and twos.  Well this was in vain! First of all because the form ones were only reporting that week (really?  Do form ones only start reporting in mid February?) and secondly because the whole country I suppose was given pretty much a week off for the elections, meaning that no new player was going to join then.

The cup half full bit was that the senior players decided to stick around to keep training during that period.  I was quite chuffed, somehow some sort of extraordinary arrangement was made (it is a boarding school and there are a number of responsibilities in terms of who looks after the kids) and close to 20 boys stayed at first.  We had them do more physical training in the morning (calisthenics and running), then at lunch time the watched a rugby game on the telly (Waweru somehow managed to get all the games from the quarter-finals on of the last world cup) and it is great to finally have the boys watch some solid rugby.  I have been trying to get them to watch rugby live, but I suppose this is even better.  Then in the afternoon we usually work on some basic skill, plus a technical team skill and then we do some simulation work. Ideally I would have loved to have 30 guys, I would have scrimmaged every morning and then worked on issues that arose during the games in the afternoon, but that is a pipe dream (numbers available) and it is impossible to arrange exhibition games against the other teams (god knows I tried!!!) as the other teams just are not interested.

All this has been going quite well except for two things (3 really) that are really pissing me off.  First off, not everyone that committed to stay stayed.  At first it didn’t bother me so much, I was happy to work with the guys that remained but it was pretty frustrating trying to figure out drills for just 15-18 players to do.  Already I was not that happy about not being able to scrimmage or have a friendly.  Then some key players (one that lives literally minutes walk away from the school) didn’t show and didn’t tell us they were leaving.  That lack of commitment/honesty really upset me.  I have come to expect more from these boys. Again, there is a silver lining.  Four of the boys that stayed were quite junior, and have grown into the roles thrust upon them… although of course they won’t effectively replace players that I have been training for three years! But the thing that has upset me the most this last week (granted I’m already tense due to the lack of players) has been the lack of commitment/focus/effort of the boys.

This is something that I never really had to face before since the first year or so that I coached them.  Since we started going to the nationals, it’s as if the whole motivational issue disappeared.  Sure, I always have to give a little push (especially at the beginning of the year), and every coach has to figure out how to motivate players at every level... but I never expected it like this. 

Literally, I have to still at this stage harp on them to concentrate on what I’m saying (ie when setting up a drill) or worse, have to yell at them to finish a simple lap!  To make matters worse, the boys have started (and this seems to be a growing culture) to start to over-nurse injuries, and come to me saying they can’t continue training because they have a cut or a bruise… I find this really infuriating!  I sort of took for granted that rugby players took pride in the pain they inflict on themselves! J  In past teams, I had to keep players off the field because they insisted that they should play despite having relatively serious injuries (muscle strains or concussions) but I’ve never seen players stay off the field because of scratches and bruises before… and to be honest, my reflex is to tell them to not come and play rugby anymore!  Literally, every drill where there is contact, someone cuts themselves or opens a scabbed wound and pulls himself out of the practice… hard to deal with.  And what do you do, call your own players wimps?  I’ve never had to do that before and I prefer not to start!

At this point, I’m not sure what to do.  Part of me wants to bench all the players that disappeared without telling us at least for a couple of games (I had ten guys at the last practice including the juniors!).  This would mean probably not advancing to the provincials.  I would then focus on bringing up the players for next year.  Alternatively, I’m thinking now of sitting them down tomorrow (those that are there) and giving them one last chance.  Saying if anyone misses a practice from now on, they are off the team.  I’ve never done this before, but I am finding myself pretty upset.  Maybe a good night’s sleep will calm me down, but it really does feel now like I’m babysitting, and I hate that! I really don’t feel like coaching a bunch of players that are not giving their all, I’d rather give the young guys a chance to shine!

At any rate, I probably wouldn't even be discussing any of this if High Schools in Kenya played rugby in May - June - July.  It really is ridiculous to play now, it is soooo hot, the pitches are rock hard, and it is difficult to get young players to play the game as it is that much more physically challenging.  Can someone please help me to change this?  Please???

Malindi 15s District Champions 2013 Debrief

I’m happy, and a little sheepish to report that Malindi High are the District champions for fifteens this year.  I made a big fuss at the start of the tournament about the quality of the field.  I’ve said it before in this blog, I understand that we are in a country with few resources and sometimes we have to make due with poor conditions.  But I think by no means should we ever accept putting children’s safety at risk.

The field we played on at Barani High had trees growing inside the end zones on both sides, on one side of the field there was a construction site with ruble sprayed throughout the field including sharp gravel and the field itself had large areas with bare stone sticking out. Malindi High has two perfectly safe pitches!  For some reason, not sure if it was pride or laziness, the other coaches didn’t want to move the games and accepted the risk of seriously injuring players.  After agreeing with all the coaches, I got the Malindi and Barani Headmasters to agree to move the games to Malindi High but then the coaches from Gede and Muyeye said they had already paid for meals at Barani High and couldn’t move.

I would say the tournament was characterized by a high number of injuries, and I would think the poor condition of the pitch had a lot to do with this.  I would call this a great shame, I was worried on at least two occasions that my players had been concussed due to head collisions in stony areas, and I saw players inadvertently run into trees several times at high risks to themselves. I think it is shameful, and I call on any rugby/school board people who are reading this to take action or at least advise me on how we can change this.  I have already noted that players in Kenya generally play without boots or mouth guards, which is not only dangerous to themselves but to others as well.

The tournament itself was interesting, in the first game, Gede beat Barani in the first surprise of the day.  I watched some of the game and to be honest it wasn’t rugby, and as Barani is the perennial favorite in this district, I was sure we were going to win every game by at least 30 points. Our first game was against Muyeye who is usually big and hard but not that skilled.  Last year I tried to get them to train with us in the summer, but perhaps due to lack of coordination but maybe due to politics it didn’t work out.  I truly believe that in order for Malindi to be strong, they need to have strong competition to challenge them and push them to the next level. 

Muyeye did their best, and they were as promised huge and probably quite over aged (more on this later). I was extremely proud of our boys.  Regardless of the fact that Muyeye was punishing them and often (almost always) offside, our boys stuck to the game plan and continued to punish them with disciplined and well thought out rugby.  Our team has a number of form twos and only five form fours, where as most of the other teams play exclusively with form fours and they managed to thrash the bigger and older Muyeye (who I thought at this point was the best competition) 25 – 0.

The next game was interesting.  I pulled out three players who came to me with injuries (two of them experienced form fours) and juggled the line up a little.  Waweru (the official coach who was in and out that day) had asked me to stick with a strong starting lineup, but I made decisions based on the injuries and stuck with them.  I could see that the players were a bit uneasy about this, and they showed it on the field to my frustration.  Two awkward bouncing balls later and we were down by two tries.  The team was in total disarray.  The marvelous organized attacking rugby we had showcased in the previous game against a better team had disappeared.  I even received a phonecall from Waweru asking why I had not played the senior guys, someone must have called him to complain.  Some players yelled from the sidelines saying that their teammates were not good enough and should be substituted, I was incensed! The team was self distructing and at the root of it was ugly direct bickering and internal criticism.

It wasn’t all bad, we missed a couple of easy kicks but got a couple as well and it was 12-6 at half time.  But I was incredibly disappointed because in my view the boys had beaten themselves.  They somehow didn’t have confidence in themselves and gave up, it was hard to watch.  After telling them what I thought (that in fact they were the better team and were beating themselves) I put the two form fours back in and we proceeded to dominate the second half, but we never returned to the organized and quite pretty “champagne rugby” we had played in the previous game.  It was more like a street brawl, and we appeared to adopt the style of the poorly coached Gede.  At some point we managed to pull back a try but despite being inside their twenty two almost the entire half, the game ended a disappointing 12-11. 

The boys were destroyed morale-wise. I got quite upset on one hand and told them what I thought about their collapse, and also told them that they would probably win the tournament at any rate, as Muyeye would probably wipe the floor with the other teams.  Waweru came back to me later and told me that these Giriama boys can only play while they are ahead, and not from behind.  We had quite a debate, and I told him that they need to learn to come back from being behind if they are to be a strong team!  Good teams should have that kind of character and teams that I grew up playing on prided themselves in that very characteristic!

At any rate the next day’s game started with Muyeye beating Barani, and then us beating Barani in another street brawl 3-0 (I was equally unimpressed, we again mimicked their primitive style) and then Muyeye played Gede to a 0-0 draw.  The tournament had typically poor refereeing.  Granted it is very difficult to ref poor quality rugby (what do you do if people are always offside and always knocking the ball forward and don’t even know most of the rules!).  But Muyeye should have scored on a few different occasions but were hampered by the ref/conditions.  They decked the ball for tries on two occasions before passing the end line as the fields were poorly marked (there were no try boxes).

In the end we would have finished behind Gede who finished with 2 wins and a tie, but apparently Gede did not submit the right documents for their players.  

They did not have team lists and birth certificates (which should be relatively easy to get at a gov’t school) to show that their players were under 19 which is this year’s new requirement.  I would suspect that both Muyeye and Gede had players who were over 22 to be honest, we should have beaten them anyway, but I am somehow happy that we are through to the next round (County championships in two weeks) and that we can learn from our mistakes.  I believe that if we work hard, we should be able to dominate the Counties and the Provincials and make a decent showing again at the Nationals!  More later… but please someone help me out on this safety issue, if we want rugby to grow in a healthy way in Kenya, this really should be addressed.

 No try box and trees in the end zone, the line closest to you is not 4 metres

 Construction site right on the sideline, there is rubble right on the touch line and plenty inside the field

 Trees growing in the endzone and chopped wood 2.5 metres from the try line

Hard to tell here but stone sticking out, you can just see it, it occurs in many places in the pitch! One of my players was probably concussed at this spot.

Our team!  District champs! :)Anthony Kiti in the middle was last year's captain!

Seasons changing!

I just got back from another extended stay in Djibouti to do my usual stint, coaching the club for the rugby season with Waweru. Last summer I managed to train a bit with some of the boys in July in August while I was here, and it was great, but due to the teachers strike in September, our plan for a tournament up country was foiled!

This year presented us with a new major challenge.  It seems the Kenya secondary schools sports association (KSSSA) has decided to change the schedules around, moving 15s rugby to the first term and 7s to the second.  This poses three major problems for us.  

First of all, fifteens is quite a complex game, and this means that our district championships are this week, just over a month after the students report to school.  It really doesn't allow for us to prepare the boys technically sufficiently for the tournament.  I'm not sure how it works in other parts of the country, but at Malindi High, where the intake comes from mainly rural areas, some of the kids tend to report late. For one, the form ones only started reporting this week.  Uninformed rugby players are dangerous rugby players.  This increases the risk of injury.  On some level, having the 7s before the 15s championship worked because the rules are a lot simpler and you could get away with managing fewer players at the beginning and the others could catch up while watching the senior players play.  The situation has been made worse now by the addition of an extra tier to the championships.  I suppose as a result of the constitution, we now have to compete in the "County" Championships after winning (Munguakipenda) the districts, then we move to the provincials and the nationals.  In past years we tended to play the 7s districts in early - mid March and then played the provincials end of March. Now we are having to play our first and seminal 15s tournament in mid February!

Secondly and most importantly, the boys can not possibly be physically prepared for the games in time with this new schedule.  Rugby is a very physically demanding sport, and is physical preparation is vitally important, without sufficient preparation, you risk serious injury.  My biggest nightmare is not my team, which is made up of students that luckily I've had the honour of coaching over the last years and have had good habits instilled in them, but the other teams, who being slightly less organized, will probably have had a couple of weeks to bring the form fours up to speed.  Physically unprepared players are dangerous to themselves and to the opponents they face, and I am sincerely worried for my players this week.

Finally, I really don't understand the logic in  playing rugby during this time of year in Kenya!!  It is the hottest and driest, and the most likely to cause injury.  Rugby (except maybe in north america which has arguably the worst rugby in the world) is usually played during the coolest and wettest periods.  When you play in full summer, the quality of the pitch deteriorates (in this part of kenya it tends to be sand and thorns!), the risk of dehydration increases and the risk of serious injury, especially concussions is multiplied. For this reason alone, I would urge the KSSSA and anyone vaguely concerned for the well being of young rugby players in Kenya to push the 15s tournaments to May-June-July, the wettest and coolest months throughout Kenya.  Ideally, the Nationals could be played at the end of July, with the provincials mid July and the Districts and County tournaments being held in June.  This would give much more time for the players to prepare, and have them playing in the period when it is safest to play rugby.  High school rugby is already plagued in Kenya by lack of equipment, many teams we meet don't have proper equipment, regularly players play (as often documented in my blog) without boots, certainly without mouth guards (I don't believe I've ever seen one on the coast) and often with trees growing in the pitch and dangerous fences in the end zone. I see no need to further put players health at risk by having them play unprepared during the most physically challenging season.

I sincerely hope that we manage to change this, as I believe strongly as educators and coaches, that the students wellbeing should be our formost concern.  I would appreciate assistance in lobbying for this, so please contact me through the blog if you can assist!

Cheers,
j

Provincial runners -up for sevens!!!

Lots to tell! haven't updated this in a while, but not because of lack of activity.... I came back to Malindi in mid February and continued training with the team which actually didn't lose that many players, although three key leaders did graduate and a couple players transfered to other schools. As expected they were crushed at Nationals, but I think it was a great experience for the boys. I focussed a lot more on fitness this year, realizing that to compete at a higher level, especially with those huge teams from up country, will require a great deal of physical play. I also actively lobbied to have more kids allowed to train, we usually had around thirty, and I'm still not sure what the dynamics there... It should be the most popular sport at the school, it's the only one that allows boys to travel outside of the district and now we've been to the Nationals! At any rate, it's a work in progress!

We had long chats with the boys about our goals, and decided we wanted to get to the Nationals again and this time try to win at least one game! A tall order as the road to the Nationals is long, and there are a number of strong teams who want to get there as well... But I told the boys that I was confident that if they worked extremely hard that we could do it.

So I suppose around two weeks ago the boys competed in the district championships, and despite a disappointing 5-0 loss to arch rivals Barani in the first match, the boys played well and stuck to the game plan. There was a bit of collapse and deviation from our strategy against Barani, I've always tried to get them to be very conservative in the early phases, try to suck the other team in a bit and then try our luck out wide, but sometimes whenputunderpressure, the boys start throwing the ball around wildly. There is also this funny hegemony in kenyan coast rugby to "flow" the ball which I think is counter productive. I guess it's what other people might call "hands", but usually involves carelessly launching the ball away from attackers, and I try to discourage it as much as possible. The other thing that really gets on my nerves is the celebrating. We crushed a couple of teams, both physically and on the scoreboard, and I was really disappointed to see the boys' exaggerated celebrations, especially the long ones after the tournament which we didn't win but advanced as the second place team.

Actually there was quite a lot of disorganization at the tournament which was quite disappointing given that the ministry of education has officials whose only role practically is to organize these things. We were told for instance that the tournament would be on Wednesday, and it turned out to be on Thursday, the matches were supposed to start at 8 and they started at 10, one of the teams arrived really late, and one team just left the field after being consistently being beaten, which is why we ended up in second, if they had stayed we would have finished first as we soundly beat galana 21-0 who beat barani 14-0 if i remember correctly. Room for improvement, but the frustrating thing is it makes it difficult to prepare the boys, and get them used to planning things well... At this point we were not training for sevens, but as usual focussed on giving the boys the skills to play their smash-mouth rugby. We had another couple of weeks to prepare for the provincials, and once again focussed on physical conditioning. I tried to organize friendly games with barani, but they never showed. That's another small frustration,waweru seems to think that nobody wants to play exhibition games against us because we are the provincial champs and this would give us an advantage... Bullocks, coast rugby will go nowhere if the boys aren't constantly competing and being exposed to the game.

I'm still trying to raise some money for a trip up country to expose the boys to some seriously competitive teams, I only need 500 dollars more! I was really excited for the provincials, as things were coming together nicely, the boys seemed to have bought in to our system and were fully committing themselves to the taxing training sessions we were running. I had a couple of kids close to throwing up a couple of times, and as a result, for the first time, managed to get them to bring water to training sessions. I was also extremely excited to have a chance to get back to Taita, which I love! It is so nice and cool and green, and I had contacted Nina who hooked me up with the university of Helsinki guest house which has a Finnish sauna and a gorgeous view. I'd stayed there before, years ago when Nina and I travelled to wundanyi together and climbed the Yala. I drove down from Mombasa the morning before the games, just in time to coach the boys to a solid 15-5 victory over a strong St George's. They had beaten us in a sevens tournament earlier, and to be honest, they were the only team I was concerned about! We then went on to win our other two games, 34-0 against Kilifi Township and 37-7 against Baptist.

Pretty much everyone considered us to be strong favorites to win as a result. We were hitting the other teams hard, and then killing them with our speed around the corner, especially from Duko, Kitti and Ndumbo. We had some bad luck, as our most reliable player, ball winner and tackler, Chaka was injured early in the second half of our first game, but we more than compensated with our strong bench, and despite loosing another key player "Biggie" at the start of the next game, and our bench being shortened to three, we still dominated. Chaka was obviously devastated, but with a dislocated shoulder, I tried to convince everyone that it would be better if he healed properly and was available for 15s. We had a quite exiting and tense quarter final against Mavuno which we won with a last second drop goal from Duko basically they were the first team that handled our speed and tackled well, they forced our team to work for what they got and didn't give us any freebies. I think our boys have gotten used to poor opposition and using their speed and strength to either break tackles or run around people, so I'm always happy when someone challenges us and forces us to play better rugby. That set up a semi final against our district rivals barani, who had been having a marvelous tournament including a scalping of last year's sevens champions Hindi in their first game.

We were the most nervous for this game, and resisted the temptation to play Chaka, but I pushed the boys to play our hard pounding game, and we did, and came away with a solid 14-0 win! we were so elated as it meant our ticket to the national championships in kisumu was assured. Problem was that our captain, Zeinya, finished with a horrible shoulder injury on a try saving tackle which left him writhing and howling in pain, so we decided once again to not take any risks, leave our injured players off (all three were eager to play in the final) and give some experience to the young boys. Well, they got it! A big, tough Shimo la Tewa team thrashed us, it was 15-0 before Duko made one of his great grubber aided runs fora try to bring it to 15-5 at the half, and I think it ended 35-5. The boys were devastated, but I was happy as ever, we had an incredible tournament and were off to the nationals for the second time in two years, once for fifteens, and once for sevens, accomplishing our goal once again! Now it's back to the training ground. Duko had a pretty bad bang to the head in the second half of the final, so he'll need to stay away from training for a while, but I've asked waweru to push the boys hard till they can't move anymore, hopefully, a couple of other friends who have expressed interest in helping out, Josh and Alex will come and help out.

We keep building, so I'm doing everything I can to move this thing forward now and keep the momentum we've created.  The focus now is on training the younger boys, and seeking strong oposition to play against regularly.  Watch this space!!! :)

WE WON THE PROVINCIALS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I can't tell you how excited I am! The boys trained very hard and persevered! Months of hard work paid off in adverse conditions! Won all of the group games 8-0 against Lamu's Hindi, 54-0 nail biter against Kikoneni, 8-5 against Mwavumo and the climax, 0-0 tie against Shimo la Tewa, a team we lost to (barely) in our first tournament of the season... then a huge 6-3 win against St Georges (one of the teams to beat that beat us in sevens) and then 5-0 win in the final against the reigning champions Waa!!!!! I honestly still can't believe that we made it!

It was the goal we set for ourselves at the beginning of the season... to make it to the nationals. And after a lot of hard work, literally blood sweat and tears, we made it! Thanks to everyone that supported us! Now this weekend the boys are in Meru for the National Championships where they are sure to get creamed, but hopefully this will be a learning experience. Normally, the Coast representatives at the Nationals loose by at least 60 point margins. Up country teams have rugby cultures, all the equipment, and the ones that make it to the nationals actually recruit for rugby players, handing out scholarships etc to physically gifted and talented athletes at nationally renowned schools. Tough for us to compete against, but we'll try! But hopefully we can keep that margin down and use this as a stepping stone for next year, and see if next year we can make it again and maybe even win a game!

Thanks again for all of your support!