Its been a busy summer so far and I managed to spend at least one week taking my eleven year old son to Yorkshire in the North of England to spend time with his grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins – great to see them all together – and how they’ve all grown – and how old they all look – and that’s not just the kids!

by Nigel Melville
Nigel Melville Direct

Its been a busy summer so far and I managed to spend at least one week taking my eleven year old son to Yorkshire in the North of England to spend time with his grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins – great to see them all together – and how they’ve all grown – and how old they all look – and that’s not just the kids!

While in the UK I met up with Roger Draper, CEO of the Lawn Tennis Association who was recovering from Wimbledon and gave me a guided tour of the Lawn Tennis Association National Training Centre in Roehampton, London – it is an outstanding centre of excellence – the USTA must be green with envy!

The interesting part of the visit for me was a discussion on development. As I am sure you are aware, one of the sporting highlights of the year is knocking the LTA every June when Wimbledon opens its gates. I have never quite understood this, the rankings say that Andy Murray (Ranked 4) will mostly likely loose to Raphael Nadal (Ranked 1) when they play – when Murray gets beaten there’s a public lashing for the LTA and Murray gets accused of letting everyone down – ridiculous!

The thirst for success in sport is of course very important, and the battle to develop a future Wimbledon Champion continues. The strategy being undertaken during Draper’s short tenure at the LTA is to make tennis available to more young children and identify better athletes to the sport of tennis who will in turn create more and better professionals players in the future – sound familiar!

I was reading somewhere how USA Rugby’s development strategy was not working and you may not be surprised to hear that I disagree. The main problem with development is that everyone wants instant success, but development takes time. In the USA, as far as I am aware, there was limited development prior to 2006. The game was meandering along and the playing demographic was top heavy, underpinned by limited youth programs.

Fast forward to 2011 and we are starting to see strong growth in pre high school programs (estimated at over 400,000 kids experiencing rugby for the first time) and strong growth in High School and College rugby for both men and women.

The high performance pathway we are developing to support this growth starts with High School All Americans (currently on tour in South Africa) and includes Junior All American U20’s and All American Colleges. The U20’s played in the Junior World Trophy in Georgia this year and the All American College team played New Zealand University’s three times in July, beating them convincingly twice. The true measure of the pathway will be the number and quality of players that make their way to the Eagles team in the future. When Eddie O’Sullivan announces his Rugby World Cup squad, a record percentage of players will have played in this program and in the future this number will rise and so will the quality.

Yesterday I was at UCSB in Santa Barbara to watch the final day of the Women’s U20 Nations Cup – participating teams played a ‘round-robin’ format during the past 10 days and the finals day yesterday saw Canada beat South Africa and the USA lose to the Champions England.

Congratulations and thanks to Kevin Battle (who is developing a strong rugby academy at the College) and USA Women’s High Performance Manager, Alex Williams for running an excellent event.

After the match I spoke to the USA U20 coach Bryn Chivers about the event and the squad. I asked three questions, are we getting better? Are we developing better players? Are we closing the ‘gap’ on England? The answer was a resounding yes.

My point is, developing world class players is a long process, but the quality of play and players across the pathway are improving all the time. We have some quality coaches working throughout the pathway and our Olympic Membership should enable us to develop world class support for the teams going forward. During the last two weeks the women’s Sevens and Fifteens both held Camps at the Olympic Training Centre in Chula Vista – some of the experienced players I spoke to told me that the camps were the best they had ever attended.

Last week I received an email from one of the England U20 parents who told me how proud he was that his daughter was playing hooker for the England U20’s at the Nations Cup. Why tell me about it? She was the among a small group of 6-10 year olds who joined the London Wasps Youth section I helped start up in the mid 1990’s – that’s a great example of how the development process works.

The Olympic Training Centre at Chula Vista is becoming the hub of our High Performance activities, and like the LTA, we still have along way to go, but the pathway and process is developing nicely and we are developing better players.

With an impressive resume as player, coach and administrator, Nigel David Melville took over as CEO and President of Rugby Operations of USA Rugby, the National Governing Body of the sport in America, in 2006.  In addition to his full time job promoting the sport in the U.S., Melville has launched his own blog, Nigel Melville Direct, to further the discussion and his passion for what it will take to make the U.S. a great rugby playing nation.

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