World Rugby’s Get Into Rugby (GIR) programme remains on course to achieve its goal of introducing one million new youngsters to the sport by Rio 2016.

In the last 12 months alone 300,000 children with no previous experience of rugby have benefitted from the scheme, taking the overall number of participants since GIR was launched in 2013 to more than 500,000.

Officials in Fiji, where previously 95 per cent of girls did not play rugby, say the three-phase programme – Try, Play and Stay - has been “a bit hit” throughout the country’s primary schools.

Girls’ participation in Fiji was encouraged by a number of initiatives such as equal representation of boys and girls at rugby festivals, giving more points for tries scored by girls in mixed competitions and using national team players as ambassadors.

Rugby is now seen as a girl's sport in Laos too. Here, the ‘Little Blossom’ programme draws on elements of GIR to teach life skills, leadership, health, fitness and rugby.

World in union

World Rugby supplies essential kit, training and education support to each of the 135 unions who have signed up for GIR, with 11,500 personnel involved in delivering training sessions across 1,300 locations worldwide.

Since the start of the programme, rugby is now a full part of the school curriculum for both girls and boys in Brunei, while in China 13,000 children in 15 cities have learnt the joys that rugby can bring. A successful IMPACT Beyond project was also organised in China alongside the Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing in August and featuring Get Into Rugby.

Dedicated staff assigned to GIR put pilot programmes into practice in Denmark, Norway and Sweden and what was learnt through these programmes was then applied throughout the rest of Europe to ensure the success in Scandinavia was reflected.

Meanwhile, in South America 9,600 Brazilian children have had an early taste of the Olympic dream after taking part in events and festivals held at facilities earmarked for use at Rio 2016.

In virgin rugby territories such as Costa Rica, Get Into Rugby has been used as an effective way of getting the sport off the ground through school/club partnerships. There are now as many GIR participants as club players in the country.

Sharing best practices is a key attribute to the success of any programme or organisation and representatives from each of the six regions – Rugby Europe, North American and Caribbean Association (NACRA), Asian Rugby Football Union, Federation of Oceania Rugby Unions, Confederación Sudamericana de Rugby (CONSUR) and Confederation Africaine de Rugby (CAR) – got together in mid-November to share their success stories at a Growing the Game Conference in London.

The programme was also recently launched in five new countries in Europe in Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain and Russia with the latter seeing activities take place in one of the coldest environments in Siberia.

 

2015: Further growth

 

Further conferences are planned in 2015 as the Get Into Rugby programme expands into even more countries. The unions of four countries in Africa (Lesotho, Malawi, Sierra Leone and Guinea) and five in Asia (Nepal, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Tajikistan) are set to take part.

 

Special Get into Rugby events are also being planned around International Women’s Day (8 March) and a Rugby World Cup 2015 ‘Rugby Day’.

 

To reflect the increased globalisation of the programme the number of languages the Get Into Rugby website is translated into will also increase from its current number of 15. Go to the dedicated website for more information HERE.