TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY of this week saw the IRFU hosting representatives from their Welsh, English and Scottish counterpart bodies in Malahide for a conference on player participation and engagement in the 16-24 age group.
The past season has seen many clubs across the country feel the effects of the lowering number of adult players, but the problems are evidently not restricted to Ireland.
A recent study by Dr. Pete Lunn, Elish Kelly and Nick Fitzpatrick of the Economic and Social Research Institute [ESRI] has shed factual evidence on this previously grey area of sporting participation, with the IRFU engaging keenly with the results.
Dr. Lunn presented those findings at the conference in Malahide this week, providing rugby development officers from all four unions with real figures that both reinforced and challenged their thinking around player participation in rugby.
Rugby’s drop-off ‘problem’
The ESRI research found that rugby suffers from two sharp drop-off groupings; players in the 11-13 age category and players in the 16-19 category. The reasons for those drop-offs are often entirely unrelated to the players’ enjoyment of the sport.
When people drop out it tends to be related to life events and transitions that are outside of sport,” explains Lunn. “If you’re working within a sporting organisation, there’s a tendency to see everything through the lens of coaching, engagement, what happens on the pitch and how your kids feel about it.
“It actually turns out that’s not what’s related to the likelihood of people dropping out at all.”
Getting children into rugby in the first place is not a major issue, with the sport enjoying a 15%-16% share of the population at early ages, according to the ESRI study, which had a sample base of 33,778 people, including over 5,000 school kids.
However, major transitions in players’ lives affect their participation rates.
“There are two key periods of drop-out for rugby,”continues Lunn. “One is the transition from primary to secondary level, and the other one is when people leave secondary level. If somebody plays rugby as an adult, by that I mean after leaving school really, then the sport has very good retention.
“If you play rugby as an adult having left school, chances are you’ll keep playing it. It’s those key junctions that we’ve identified in our research as being key.
“You get as many as 15 or 16% of all kids playing rugby in their later primary school years at age 11 or 12, but that drops by about half by the time they’re in first or second year of secondary school. So there’s a big drop from mini rugby through to secondary.
Then when you get to the transition of leaving secondary level, you again get a big shake-out. Some of that is associated with the final exam year, some of it happens between fifth and sixth year. Then also, you get another bit of drop-out as actually they leave school.”
Those findings back up anecdotal impressions that exam stress and pressure so often leads to young players drifting away from rugby, sometimes with to the encouragement of parents and teachers.
However, this study suggests that such a move may be counter-intuitive.
“One of the things that our research shows is that kids who play sports get better grades,” says Lunn. “There is no association that suggests that if you’re playing sports in school, you get worse grades. In fact, it’s the opposite.
“We can’t argue that that’s causal, we can’t know that. There is a strong association between playing sports and getting better Leaving Cert grades, but I think that some parents and teachers think playing sport negatively affects your grades.”
While Lunn’s expertise lies in the research and it is the job of the IRFU and other rugby unions to use the ESRI’s findings in a meaningful manner, the former BBC journalist does have some insight into what works in helping to prevent player drop-off.
“The key thing that typifies participation programmes that have been effective is that they’re about communication. They’re about communicating with the people that are participants and non-participants.
A lot of it [drop-off] is due to losing touch and losing contact. Convenience becomes increasingly important as you go into adult life. It needs to fit around your schedules reasonably flexibly.
“Soccer benefits from the fact that you can organise it very flexibly. People can get together for 5-a-side, get scratch teams together in work. A greater proportion of people playing soccer in their adult lives are playing these different forms.”
It is worth noting that rugby’s drop-off problem shades in comparison to other sports. In basketball, 75% of players drop out of the game in the three to four years after turning 16.
In that same period, hurling and Gaelic football lose more than half of their players, while rugby loses ‘just’ 18%. That is not to say that rugby should be congratulating itself; there is clearly room for improvement.
What are the IRFU planning?
The mention of ‘different forms’ of soccer is particularly relevant to how the IRFU hopes to introduce those who have dropped out of rugby participation back into the game.
The Irish rugby governing body’s Director of Rugby Development and the Club Game, Scott Walker, explains one recent example and the thinking behind it.
“One of the projects we’ve been running in the last couple of months has been in Limerick, where we’re actually targeting those who’ve walked away from the game. We’ve been running a touch programme and we’ve had about 400 participants come through that. The idea is that those people will be led back into the clubs again.”
We’re not saying that all 400 will move back into playing the 15-a-side game, but if you’re playing a touch game at your club, and there’s a 15s game occurring on the next pitch, it’s easier to get that transition in.
“That’s where social rugby comes in, where people are looking for fun, social engagement and fitness. A lot of our programmes will be about how we can create pathways back into the 15-a-side game, because it’s very important that the clubs remain at the very heart of everything we do.
“That’s where they’re going to get life-long involvement.”
The IRFU has only ramped up its focus in this area over the last six months, but the use of touch and TAG rugby to re-introduce those who have fallen away from rugby seems a sensible ploy.
Those forms of the sport also provide scope for bringing completely new players into rugby. Walker cites a recent mixed sex touch rugby tournament run out of Terenure College RFC in Dublin as an indicator of what may come in the future.
Electronic team sheets at TAG rugby competitions from next season onwards will allow the IRFU to keep track of participation in that form of the game, with the intention being to ensure that players don’t slip out of action.
Addressing the sometimes-overbearingly serious nature of schools rugby may be one step towards preventing male players dropping out of the game. Not that Walker and the IRFU would think of toying with a top-end system that is producing promising players for the provinces; rather they will look to make rugby more accessible to those who are not involved with their schools’ first teams.
If you look in other sports, there tends to be an uptake of sport in transition year. In rugby, it tends to go the other way. Some of that is around the intensity of the Junior Cup, where players come out of that and probably don’t want to go straight back into that structure.
“We are seeing a number of schools teams decrease over the last five years. I think the focus we need to get back into is the social elements of school teams; those house teams, seconds and thirds teams, of which there has been a decrease.
“We need those players to transition into the club game, because they’re the future volunteers and coaches.”
What are your experiences of players dropping out of rugby? Is it to do with those major life transitions? What solutions would you suggest to keep more young players involved in the game through to adulthood?
