Little Ruckers: part 1

Junior rugby has been a stop-start process in Finland. There is no official junior league running, but a dedicated few around the country are spearheading the development of Finland's future rugby players. In the first of several interviews with key persons on the junior seen, Ruck Tales talks to Miika Valo, who is heading up junior rugby in Tampere and at the forefront of national junior development.

 

Ruck Tales (RT): What’s your background in rugby, Miika?

Miika Valo (MV): My work has taken me around world for the past 25 years: Germany, Israel, China, the Netherlands - but luckily I’ve always been able to find a rugby team to silly enough to allow me to run the ball with them. A few years back it finally dawned on me that the others were not actually getting faster but I was getting slower and so my rugby turned into playing only touch and I got involved in junior coaching, in the Netherlands.

RT: What is the current state of junior rugby in Finland?

MV: Most clubs have juniors, albeit in numbers too small to put together a team for a junior competition. This past year the tactic has been to organise junior get-togethers (national training days) which has proven rather successful, with attendances of 20-35 players from all age groups. There is a lot of will and motivation from the juniors; however, it is still a very ‘tentative’ attempt to form an actual active age-group rugby structure in the country, i.e. a lot of work ahead. Juniors have had 5 major events from 2011 (snow events) to 2012 with players participating from most of the clubs.

RT: What are some of the key problems in expanding the junior game?

MV:  In my view, it all boils down to motivation & energy, i.e. the clubs need to REALLY want juniors - the rest is just ‘technicalities’. It might not make me hugely popular, but when I hear clubs name their key problems as recruiting, facilities, lack of coaches or support from SRL, I cannot help but see it as a mix-up between the cause and the effect - the latter being the effect - I must go back to old wisdom: ‘when there is a will, there’s a way’! Having said that, there are also objective challenges relating to budgets, municipality priorities and to fact that the season is being played during the school vacation period. One key problem that should be addressed, on the national level (top down solution) is publicity of the sport – rugby is not a sport people generally know about in Finland and this matter should be dealt with, post haste. Having witnessed the rise of American football in the early eighties, they clearly did something right and one of the key items they cared for was making the sport known to all, but namely to young people. 

 (photo by Tony Brick - Junior camps, such as this one in Helsinki, have been a lifeline for future players)

RT: How much of a problem is rugby’s image as a ‘violent’ or ‘dangerous’ sport?

MV: I don’t think this is an issue - quite the contrary. Finns don’t mind a bit of physicality, and I think that the contact side of the game should be used to attract new players. Furthermore, rugby’s ethos of sportsmanship and fairness (‘a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen’) should appeal to the local mentality of honour and fair contest.

RT: How do we move forward with junior rugby in Finland?

MV: There needs to be a clear statement made across the board placing age group rugby as a national priority in the development of the sport. The SRL and clubs need to acknowledge that only through an proper junior programme will the sport grow beyond its current niche state. I am aware of lot of good work that has been and is done in development and the numbers are growing, however now it is time to address the actual growing platform, i.e. the juniors. One of the key problems is that when someone gets juniors going in one club, the effort turns out to be counterproductive when other clubs do not, and the juniors leave the sport disappointed, as there is no-one to play against. The sport needs to “mushroom”, with 3-5 clubs pushing the junior development forward simultaneously.

One practical way would be to start a winter league, of national touch rugby competition, combined with large training events. The touch rugby tournament should be mixed gender and age, from which all players would benefit. I think that this platform would work better than the attempt to get tag rugby in schools going. I don’t mean that the school programme should be cancelled, but work in parallel with the club work.

Recruiting should be aimed first and foremost at age groups 13-17, and not 17-19, which is the feeding group to adult rugby. This would assure much higher skill levels by the time they players reach adult rugby, but more importantly a complete different club management mind-set, since coaching these age groups means specific junior coaching. I firmly believe that many ex-players would be excited by the challenge of developing rugby in Finland by passing their experience to the lads and lassies.