Rugby Canada Wants You!

Athletes Seek to Be on Rugby Canada Radar at Try 4 Gold Talent Camp

SportsJulian McKenzie — Published November 17, 2014 | Updated November 18, 2014 at 3:52am

“Rugby is a combination of [many] sports,” said François Ratier, head coach of the Canadian senior women’s national rugby team. “You could be a judoka and [play] basketball and be a great rugby player.

“Rugby is pushing, lifting, sprinting, jumping. Everything is there.”

This past weekend, Ratier and his fellow coaches hosted the Montreal edition of the “Try 4 Gold Talent ID Camp” at the Concordia Stinger Dome at Loyola Campus. 120 athletes, male and female, attended the camp, where they were evaluated on their broad jumps and 10m, 30m, and 40m sprints.

“We’re looking at athletes coming from soccer, from hockey, football,” said Dana Agar-Newman, one of the rugby coaches on hand at the camp.

It was the first of four camps being held across Canada, as three other camps will take place in Sherbrooke, Red Deer and Burnaby.
“It’s just about testing today,” Ratier added. “I just tried to identify the fastest and the strongest male and female players in this area. From this, we’re going to call back the fastest and the strongest to assess them and to see how they can play rugby.”

Once the coaches separate the physical specimens and top athletes from the rest of the pack, they will test them on their rugby IQ and see if they’re capable of representing Canada in future sevens rugby tournaments, which differ from the larger 15-a-side version, included in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.

The camp featured athletes from the ages 15 and up, from various parts of Canada and the United States.

“My mom told me there was this rugby [camp] going on in Canada,” said Prosper Bayer, a five-foot-four 15-year old native of Kenya who flew from his home in Washington, DC to Montreal the night before in order to attend the camp.

Bayer took up the sport when he was three years old in Kenya and even represented his home country in youth tournaments. However, Bayer, whose parents are Canadian, desires to represent Canada in future tournaments, and eventually hopes to acquire Canadian citizenship to play.

“I love this sport,” he added. “If someone told me to stop playing rugby, I would rather die because I love this sport.”

Even various Stingers athletes were on hand for the camp, including men’s soccer player Vincent Murray, who is planning on switching to rugby from soccer. The second-year forward wanted to try a new sport after dedicating himself to soccer for most of his life.

“For the past year and a half I’ve been looking at the rugby team here at Concordia,” he said. “Pretty interesting squad; [they’ve got a] good coach. Just really looking to change scenery and try a contact sport.”

Of course, rugby players from both the men’s and women’s teams were participating in drills, and they certainly didn’t take them lightly.

“I was uber-stressed about obtaining good results,” said prop Erika Ikonomopoulos, from the Stingers women’s rugby team. Ikonomopoulos participated at the camp, but admitted she didn’t feel 100 per cent as she’s still recovering from a broken leg she suffered months ago.

The rugby players also took note of the athletes from other sports that participated at the camp and how they fared in comparison to rugby players.

“You could tell that different [athletes] have different form, different ways of doing things,” added Ikonomopoulos. “It was actually quite interesting that Canada is open to having that broad perspective on not just sticking to rugby [players and] that other [athletes] could actually be included.”

Rugby is still distant from hockey in terms of popularity, but there’s reason to believe that with the viewership from this past summer’s Women’s World Cup of Rugby in France, the upcoming Games in 2016 and with more efforts to spread the game, the sport is due for a rise in attention.

“A lot of people don’t even know we have [rugby] clubs in the summer,” said Caleb Jordan from the Stingers men’s rugby team. “They don’t talk about the school teams much so I think that promoting around schools in general would be good.”

“Sevens is a really exciting game,” added Agar-Newman. “Lots of sprinting, real quick games. [I’m] really curious to see how the Canadian public views it when it’s shown on the big screen.”