Hoërskool Bastion welcomed the ShadowBall and Nashua Rugby Skills Project onto their rugby field recently.
Junior rugby players had the opportunity to meet former Springbok players Gcobani Bobo, Morgan Newman and Conrad Jantjes during break, then stayed after school for a few hours to train with these rugby legends.
The ShadowBall initiative, in association with Nashua, was started by its current director, Gary Crooks, with the aim of greatly improving school rugby players’ skills.
The project entered its third year by beginning its visits to schools across the entire South Africa. Barely a month after the first term started, they made their visit to Bastion.
The programme entails an initial training session with young players and their coaches as Gcobani, Morgan and Conrad show them a few tactics which will greatly improve their skills in the long-term. Learners will train with shadow balls, which are special training balls with one flattened end, which allows players to practise by themselves against any wall.
Ten balls were also given to the schools as a training aid.
ShadowBall and Nashua will return after six weeks to measure the players’ improvement. Their start and end scores will be noted and placed on the programme’s website alongside the statistics from all the other schools involved in the project. The winning school will receive R30 000 at the end of the programme, and a sum total of R50 000 will be divided up among other top players.
This initiative spans across 35 cities, 140 schools and approximately 5 000 players.
“ShadowBall is a much-needed skills training aid and programme that solves the big problem of skill deficiency in our rugby players,” Gary said.
“This great partnership highlights Nashua’s incredible commitment to South African rugby.”
We have seen enormous improvement in our players over the past two years. On average, players have improved by 42 per cent, and top players improved by 107 per cent. The highest reported individual improvement was 300 per cent, from a Paarl Boys’ High learner.
Bastion aims to move up to among the top five teams in the programme.
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