Country Rugby: The Development Question (Part 4)

The Postcode Problem: How Do We Reduce the Cost of Chasing Opportunity?

Rugby cannot change the geography of New South Wales. It can change how much development requires families to travel across it.

By Pete Collins | Choice Driven Athletic Development & Career Mentoring

In Part One, we identified geography as one of the fundamental challenges facing player development in country NSW.

In Part Two, we established an important distinction.

Part Three established that development needs to continue between representative campaigns.

That creates an immediate practical problem: How do you provide that development to players living hundreds of kilometres apart?

For country families, ambition is often measured in kilometres. Trials require travel. Representative training requires travel. Championships require travel. Specialist coaching can require more travel. Eventually, opportunities with metropolitan programs may require considerably more again.

Each individual journey can appear manageable. Across an entire season, the cost changes:

• Fuel
• Meals
• Accommodation
• Vehicle expenses
• Time away from work
• Time away from school
• Recovery
• Sleep
• Family commitments

For many families, those sacrifices are willingly made. But willingness and financial capacity are not the same thing. Eventually, geography can indirectly begin influencing opportunity. An invitation might technically be available to every identified player, but if one athlete drives 20 minutes and another drives four hours, the opportunity is not practically identical.

Shifting to a Hybrid Development Model

So what is the answer? It cannot be eliminating distance. The answer is reducing the number of times a player needs to travel simply to receive development that could have been delivered another way.

That is another principle Choice Driven is attempting to build into its model. A young athlete should not have to travel to Sydney every week to receive a strength program. They should not need to travel hundreds of kilometres for somebody to review match footage.

Nutrition conversations can occur remotely. Development meetings can happen online. Training programs can be delivered and monitored digitally. Local coaches can communicate with specialists, and players can remain in their local gym and their local club.

Then travel becomes deliberate:

• Bring athletes together when specialist positional coaching genuinely requires face-to-face interaction.
• Bring them together for physical testing.
• Bring them together for camps.
• Bring them together for quality competition.
• Bring them together when the experience justifies the kilometres.

A hybrid model will never make the country and metropolitan experience identical—nor does it need to. Its objective is to ensure a family’s capacity to purchase kilometres does not become one of the most important factors in their child’s development.

Protecting Local Country Clubs and Communities

Regional hubs could form part of that system. Rather than attempting to place every specialist in every town, strategically located centres could periodically bring players and coaches together. Between those sessions, development continues locally.

That also protects something enormously important: country clubs.

The solution cannot simply be removing talented players from regional rugby as quickly as possible. Strong players strengthen local competitions. Younger players see people from their own communities progressing. Talented teenagers can benefit from playing senior rugby when physically and developmentally appropriate. If every promising player is told the answer is to leave, country rugby eventually weakens the environment producing them.

Delivering Development Where Players Live

Choice Driven’s developing approach is therefore based on keeping players within their existing environments for as long as those environments continue serving their development. Move when there is a genuine reason to move. Travel when there is a genuine reason to travel. But do not confuse distance with development.

Technology has given rugby tools that previous generations never possessed. The question is whether the pathway is using them deliberately enough.

Country NSW will always involve long drives. That is unavoidable. What should be avoidable is making a family drive hundreds of kilometres for something that could have reached their child at home.

And if development is going to be delivered closer to the player, somebody needs to coordinate it. That leads to another question raised in Part One: Who is actually responsible for delivering development across such enormous regional areas?