All the way to Ireland for a training session with Heidi’s girls team at Bruff RFC.

We took a week off work for a small holiday break in Ireland to watch the Crusaders play Munster. It was also an opportunity to meet up with old friend Heidi and she asked me to come and help out with her team!

What to do?

We were planning the session and Heidi explained the average age of the girls is 12 but some are younger. She has some strong carriers who break tackles and score a lot of tries. They dominate play and others do not get much ball. How to get others involved? Heidi told me she has little rules like only scoring three tries but she was obviously not happy about that and a bit stuck.

The Development Phase

I told Heidi her situation is very typical of that age group and phase in their development of Attack in Open Play and explained what we were going to do next day. First, we were going to categorise the team in three groups: 1. Leaders 2. Followers and 3. Satellites. What categorises them?

• Leaders: comfortable with making actions with the ball;
• Followers: support Leaders, make limited action with the ball, pass it on to Leaders very quickly;
• Satellites: are always positioning, close to the Leaders and Followers but not too close to get involved. They never seem to get the ball;

Heidi smiled because she immediately knew how her players slotted in these three categories! Next step is to realise the players are not fixed in the categories and it is our objective as trainers to make everybody a Leader, comfortable making an action with the ball. I think she was a bit sceptical about that ambition! In the team exercises Heidi needed to make two teams with all three categories distributed between them.

Learning Method

The LPM, Pierre Villepreux approach is explained very easily. Players learn by doing, so we need to give them the experience of running into space, evading defenders. Us trainers have these options to control this:

• Create an unbalance in attack and defense with the starting positions and
• by having different numbers of players near the ball;
• Actively start play, give the first player the ball running;

And with that active start we have the opportunity to give the ball to players in each category and so actively involve Satellites and Followers with an easy start. Execution is something else though, I promised to show and explain. Obviously Heidi was very excited about this and eager to give it a go!

Back to Bruff

Sunday morning, it was already busy at Bruff RFC with lots of teams practising and playing rugby. Crazy: former star international Big John Hayes was running a session with the Boys Under 14s!

Warm-up done I told the girls we wanted to try something different and asked them to just go for it and it would be okay. I did the sideline start exercise because the players have lots of space to run into.

Like expected, we saw the three types of players perform in this exercise, how to limit that Leader? Heidi and I discussed and decided to make the pitch smaller: less space to run into! I surprised Heidi when I asked the girls: “Is it now more difficult or easier?” and we were both surprised that we got both answers. But consensus was it was easier to defend and more difficult to attack.

I ran another drill to show Heidi how to start Open Play with an easy start for a Satellite. Really great she then wanted to give it a go too!

It all went well obviously with also Satellites now scoring and with that becoming 2. Followers. The success of Pierre and LPM’s methods are always so wonderful to experience.

More about the Le Plaisir de Mouvement here.

Feedback

Everybody smiling, the girls, Heidi and the parents, all that energy, it was great to be part of this!

Heidi meant to text you yesterday to say thank you for the really great training session- the girls came home beaming.

Thanks for a great training session, Kerri really enjoyed it😊

I have a lot of respect for Heidi! Everybody was learning, it was very powerful for the team to see her try something new she never did before and see her learn too!

Some reflection

Watching France v Ireland Six Nations game a day before I realised I was still a bit hang-over from that quarter final defeat of France and the way how RSA won that title. From Cup to Club was much better for me and I enjoyed that Munster v Crusader game. But to be out with the Bruff Under 12 Girls was really what I needed to find my fun in rugby again. Thanks Heidi and Girls!

Questions to ask

Are you an Under 12 coach too? Do you recognise Heidi’s predicament? How did you solve this? Feel free to contact me if you want a bit more on this approach!

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