Friends Of STAR

You simply can't beat experience.

I was in the bank this morning and a young student, was trying to open an account with a very rude teller telling him he didn't have the correct "letter of introduction".

The confused student left the building, I followed him and told him to just go and see his course secretary and ask for one.

I asked him what course he was studying. "International banking and corporate finance," he told me with a smile.

If he'd been experience he'd have argued, asked to see the manager and got an account opened.

In sport, experience is everything: once you've had your back to the wall you know how to get off it.

The best blokes in a rugby team are never the young colts, who can run all day, but the older men who know where and when to run. 

When it's all going horrible pear-shaped on the pitch, the players look to the men of experience to get them out of it.

Players like Mario Ledesma Arocena of Clermont or his partner in the front row for Argentina Rodrigo ‘RoRo’ Roncero, Brian O'Driscoll from Leinster, Martin Castrogiovanni from Leicester, and Simon Shaw from Wasps.

And closer to home, during the Old Boys Weekend of 2006, we had players like Pot (batch 87), Azad (batch 80), Jaws (batch 87), Lemang (batch 89), Badut / Alias and a few more (batch 90) and yours truly (batch 86) played against a group of just out of school or undergrads from MCKK.

There is no chance of us winning playing against those young lads, until …… the results showed otherwise.

So, the moral of the story is that a team of 30-year-olds will always know how to beat a team of 20-year-olds.

In short, the kind of men you would bet on to do the right thing at the right time in big games because they have been there before.

Perhaps that's the problem that STAR rugby team is facing now is lack of match experience.

An average player in STAR will play 2-3 games a year for the district championship. Then if they are chosen to play for the district (not like our days when the School who won will represent the district) they will play another maybe 4 games at the most during the inter district championship. Unless the player is chosen to represent the State for MSSM, then that’s it. A maximum of 7 games per year!

If the player is not good enough to play at form 2 or form 4, they will only play 14 games the whole time they are in STAR.

Add say … another 10 games for 7s and 10s championship … an average player in STAR will only play a maximum of 25 games of rugby through their school years.

Is the match experience good enough for them to be a successful rugby player whilst they are in school?

During the Cobra 10s school championship; what I saw was a young group of players lack game experience. They don’t work on instinct. They panic fast. They listen too much to their coaches (who were shouting their lungs out from the touch flanks). They don’t communicate enough among themselves to plan things. The coaches are there to guide them but the choices are theirs.

What can we do to improve this? Well, as every mother knows, young men grow up very quickly. What is happening to the young players of STAR is that they have been chucked in at the deep end, and dealing with the defeats is all part of the learning process.

Experience can be painful. STAR's players are getting painful lessons at a very, very young age. They will learn from this and improve very quickly.

And hopefully with the support of Friends of STAR, the school team will have at least 5-10 friendly games a year before they hit the big games.

So, who are we playing next!!