The design of age-appropriate organized activities has become a key issue for National Governing Bodies when introducing children to organized competitive games during childhood. For the Rugby Football Union, the complexity, physicality and structure of adult rugby union provides unique challenges when introducing children to organized mini rugby games. Although organized competitive team games are one of the key childhood developmental activities in sport, empirical research examining the development of this type of activity is sparse. A mixed methods convergent parallel research design was used where qualitative and quantitative data was collected and analyzed separately, and merged for overall analysis. Using the Developmental Model of Sports Participation as a conceptual framework, elite rugby union coaches’ views on mini rugby participation were explored. The rules of play of under-9 mini rugby matches were modified to investigate whether the principles of practice from the Developmental Model of Sports Participation could be applied to rugby games; and coaches and players attitudes and opinions towards key components of under-9 rugby explored. In the first study, the elite coaches identified organised competition and appropriate adult involvement as beneficial to player development, with an emphasis on less-structured games and sampling a variety of sports. In the second study, under-9 games based on the principles of practice from the Developmental Model of Sports Participation had 25% more ball-in-play time; 55% more runs with the ball; more than twice as many successful passes; and nearly twice as many tries scored. In the final two studies all under-9 players felt strongly that the game should involve limited structure, no playing positions and focus on passing and tackling. In contrast, under-9 coaches favoured a hybrid version of mini rugby with high amounts of engagement, skill learning opportunities, and structure. The findings show support for an alternative pathway for childhood rugby union participation, where organized competitive matches are a key developmental activity, alongside sampling a variety of sports. The results also suggest that deliberate play principles can be applied to the rules of under-9 rugby to produce a developmentally appropriate game for children.

Rugby union requires high levels of strength and power in order to support the physical requirements of the game. The competitive structure of rugby union in the English premiership places limitations on the time available for players’ physical development. The aim of this thesis was to analyse the scope and magnitude of strength and power adaptation potential, whilst identifying effective training strategies to support physical development in professional rugby union players. Chapter 3 monitored lower limb strength and power during the different phases of a professional season. This study demonstrated moderate beneficial increases in all physical capacities over a full season whilst pre and mid-season training cycles represent the greatest opportunity for strength and power enhancement. Chapter 4 assessed the efficacy of complex training performed during a mid-season performance phase and found meaningful increases in selected measures of power whilst maximum strength was maintained. Chapter 5 assessed the impact of pre-conditioning exercise mode selection (cycling or weightlifting) when designing complex training interventions and reported highly individualised response patterns in measures of lower and upper body performance. Chapter 5 also demonstrated no clear support for the short-term effects of elevated free-testosterone on local and systemic muscle performance. Chapter 6 investigated the effects that manipulating work interval duration has on fast muscle activity and power during high intensity interval training (HIT). This study reported greater accumulative power responses and fast muscle activation in selected muscles when shorter work interval durations were prescribed. In summary, scope for physical development exists in professional rugby union players. Complex training may be an efficient in-season training method for power development. Hormonal response patterns represent unpredictable markers of acute and chronic improvements in local and systemic muscle performance. Finally, the endurance potential of fast muscle groups may benefit from HIT protocols designed with shorter work interval durations.

The purpose of this programme of work was to assess the physical demands of rugby union with the aim of creating a rugby-specific match-play simulation to examine the effect of nutritional interventions on performance of, and recovery from, rugby-specific exercise.

There is growing interest in utilising virtual environments (VEs) in the context of sports. In particular there is a desire to be able to improve sensorimotor skills rather than just using a VE as a tool for strategy analysis, or entertainment. While there have been a number of VEs developed for the sports of tennis, football and baseball, very little work has been done for the game of rugby. The main aim of this thesis is to address this gap in the research. Passing is chosen as the skill in question, as it is considered a core, fundamental skill of the game that is sometimes forgotten amongst more complex training regimes. No previous work has been undertaken to build a virtual environment to train passing skills for rugby, and so a prototype system has been designed to explore it's potential. The system (VERST: a Virtual Environment for Rugby Skills Training) was designed to have a user facing a large screen with a virtual scene containing targets; the user holds a real rugby ball (tethered to prevent damage to equipment) and must throw it at the virtual targets. The system was tested in two exploratory experiments featuring a throwing task and a verbal estimation task. 10 participants were recruited to assess the perception of depth for the virtual targets and the suitability of the design of the system. Different configurations of the hardware were tested: the participant's position relative to the screen, the use of stereoscopy and the use of a floor screen. The results suggests that the difference in intended target distances is being correctly perceived, but that the subjects were not tlu'owing that distance. Though the reason for this is not clear, it is possible that the virtual scene chosen for the task lacked sufficient depth cues. It is also possible that the task was not appropriately designed, as the task of throwing the ball forward is an illegal move in a game of rugby. Despite negative results from the throwing task, VERST has proven to be a useful platform for investigating the optimal set up of a virtual environment for training ball passing skills in rugby.

This thesis was written as a collection of research papers through which the identification, quantification, discrimination and development of training behaviours in professional rugby players were investigated. Qualitative and quantitative research methods were used in this thesis, and confirmatory factor analyses were completed on two measurement tools. Specifically study 1 interviewed six premiership coaches in an attempt to make their implicit knowledge of the selection of young, potential professional, rugby players to professional academies explicit. Open, thematic, axial and selective coding was used to allow themes to emerge from the initial interviews. Trustworthiness of the data was maintained by member checking, parallel coding, and a focus group. Seven themes emerged from the coaches' data; dependability, coping with the training environment, quality of preparation, distractibility, ability to be coached, social skill, and intensity of effort. Study 2 attempted to discriminate between the behaviours of professional and amateur rugby players. Using the seven themes, from study 1, two measurement tools were developed. The players' questionnaire was distributed to 308 rugby players and the second questionnaire to the coaches of those players. Results revealed six different training behaviours were significant in discriminating between amateur and professional players. Two behaviours were agreed by the coaches and the players. Two behaviours the players identified as discriminatory, but the coaches did not. Two behaviours the coaches identified as discriminatory, but players did not. Study 3 attempted to improve the most discriminatory behaviour the coaches identified in a group of professional rugby players. A 12 week intervention took place with three measurement points pre- intervention, at week 6 of the intervention and post-intervention. A second group of professional rugby players acted as a control group. Any implications drawn from these results should be treated with caution as a series of confounding variables potentially disrupted the study.

This thesis was concerned with a performance management and analysis case study intervention with an International Rugby Board (IRB) tier two international squad, focusing on change. An initial interview study investigated the concept of Performance Management (PM) in elite rugby union from the perspective of eight leading high performance managers. The findings highlighted the importance of people management, possessing a strategic vision, achieving simplicity and clarity from complex issues, and creating and managing change in order to save time for athletes and coaches. The second interview study explored the nature of Performance Analysis (PA) in elite rugby union. The findings identified that PA involved interpreting and filtering large unwieldy data sets, the coach-analyst relationship was critical to success, and player-centred analysis needed to promote learning through behavioural change. Collectively, the findings highlight that PM and PA have a number of conceptual similarities that include a reductive approach to identify impact metrics (measures with direct relevance to performance) that provide a basis for context-specific feedback. Both PM and PA provide a structure and agency to a performance learning environment by connecting the multidisciplinary components, and improving the performance empathy of managers, coaches and athletes often in an intuitive and instinctive manner. The critical similarity and function, however, relates to outputs in both areas that save time for those most directly involved with performance decision making. In order to support the case study intervention, an integrated model of PM and PA was designed to help investigate how change could be implemented within a tier two international rugby union environment. The findings demonstrated the importance of a performance review in creating a context-specific strategic plan, and the need for performance standards that move from exceeding organisational best (peak performance) to a level that is consistently higher than that of the majority of peer organisations in the same sector, and over a prolonged time period (high performance). PM creates a currency of feed forward, generates outputs that can always be traced back to the underpinning strategy and performance philosophy, and allows for a cut-edit-paste strategy as opposed to the blind imitation of cut and paste. Integrated (qualitative and quantitative) performance analysis provides impact and iii saves time for both the performance manager and the concomitant learning environment by translating key trends from a reductive analysis of large data into key performance outcomes. The overall findings of the thesis have facilitated a greater understanding of the development of performance management and performance analysis as a prerequisite for performance success in elite rugby union that can be used to initiate change. In addition, the findings have been utilised to re-design a national governing body elite coach award course, and to develop a level six module for final year undergraduate students.

No description available.

Establishing the accurate quantification of the training load is a key focus for researchers and sport scientists to maximise the likelihood of appropriate training prescription. In the field, there are numerous methods adopted to quantify the physiological, physical, mechanical, and other loads placed on team sports athletes, including global positioning systems, accelerometry, heart rate and session rating of perceived exertion. Each method can be classified within one of two theoretical constructs: the external or internal training load. Due to the lack of a gold standard criterion, previous research has investigated validity through relationships with criterion measures of load or dose-response associations with chronic changes in physical fitness. The current research designs within investigations into the validity of those methods have failed to consider the influence of the mode of training on the validity of the measures. As strength and conditioning coaches utilise a variety of training modes to stress the various physiological systems to promote the adaptations required to succeed in competition, investigating the influence of training type on training load validity is warranted. To achieve this, the research (Chapters 3-6) was conducted within two professional rugby league clubs, where training load data (global positioning system, accelerometry, heart rate, session rating of perceived exertion) were collected across three twelve week pre-season preparatory periods. Training sessions were demarcated by training mode. The results of the first study showed that meaningful differences in the distances covered within arbitrary speed-and metabolic power-derived-thresholds exist between field-based training modes (small-sided games, conditioning, skills, speed). These differences in external load also led to differences in the perceptual- and heart-rate-derived internal load response. Establishing how those differences in demands influence the relationships between multiple external and internal training load methods is important to establish the validity of individual methods across different modes of training. In our case study approach in study two, the main finding was that when session rating of perceived exertion (sRPE) demonstrated trivial differences across multiple skills training sessions, large variation was present (coefficient of variation range 31-93%) in other training load methods (individualised training impulse [iTRIMP], Body Load™, Total Number of Impacts, high-speed distance) which reduced (coefficient of variation range 3-78%) when sRPE demonstrated trivial differences during small-sided games. This provided initial evidence that training load measures provide different information which might be influenced by the training mode. However, a more comprehensive investigation was needed. In the third study we aimed to examine the influence of training mode on the variance explained between measures of external (arbitrary high-speed distance, Body Load™, total-impacts) and internal (iTRIMP, sRPE) training load over two twelve week pre-season preparatory periods. This was replicated in our fourth study, across a shorter period of training from a different team utilising different methods in which to represent the external (individualised high-speed distance, PlayerLoad™) and internal (heart rate exertion index [HREI], sRPE) training load. During both investigations, we determined the structure of the interrelationships of multiple internal and external load methods via a principal-component analysis (PCA). Within the findings of both investigations, the extraction of multiple dimensions (two principal components) in certain modes of training suggests a single training load measure cannot explain all the information provided by multiple measures used to represent the training load in professional rugby league players. Therefore, if a single measure is used this could underrepresent the actual load imposed onto players. However, establishing the ‘dose-response’ associations between training load and the changes in training outcomes, such as physical fitness is also needed to establish validity. As a result, during study five, we aimed to determine the influence of training mode on the ‘dose-response’ relationship between measures of external (PlayerLoad™ ) and internal (sRPE, HREI) training load and acute changes in physical performance (countermovement jump, 10- and 20-m sprint, Yo-Yo intermittent recovery test level 1) following conditioning and speed training. sRPE was the only training load measure to provide meaningful relationships with changes in Yo-Yo intermittent recovery test level 1 performance. This provides the first evidence of the acute dose-response validity of the sRPE method. No measure provided meaningful relationships with all changes in performance. Therefore, further investigation is warranted to establish whether a combination of measures reflect better those changes than individual measures. The findings of the thesis suggests that practitioner should consider the implementation of both external and internal training load methods within their monitoring practices and researchers should establish multivariate and mode-specific relationships between training load methods to elucidate appropriate evidence of validity.

The contacts and collisions that are inherent to elite Rugby Union, alongside changes to players’ physical characteristics and match activities, have raised concerns regarding the level of injury burden associated with the professional game. This programme of research was therefore undertaken to investigate injury risk in this setting. The first study of this thesis (Chapter 3) presents a meta-analytic review of injury data relating to senior men’s professional Rugby Union, which shows an overall match incidence rate of 81 per 1000 player hours; this value is high in comparison with other popular team sports. In Chapter 4, the importance of injuries in the context of performance is demonstrated by showing a substantial negative association exists between injury burden and team success measures. Chapter 5 investigates subsequent injury patterns in this population and identifies injury diagnoses with a high risk of early recurrence, whilst also demonstrating that subsequent injuries are not more severe than their associated index injury. Playing professional Rugby Union on an artificial playing surface does not influence overall acute injury risk in comparison with natural grass surfaces (Chapter 6). Chapters 7 and 8 identify intrinsic risk factors for injury (previous injury, match and training loads) for the first time in this setting, and may be used to inform policies on these pertinent issues. Finally, predictive modelling techniques show some potential for predicting the occurrence and severity of injuries, but require further refinement before they can be implemented within elite Rugby Union teams. Overall, this programme of work highlights the importance of injury prevention for all professional Rugby Union stakeholders, addresses the need to use appropriate statistical techniques to account for the dynamic and clustered nature of sport injury data, and demonstrates approaches through which the injury burden associated with elite Rugby Union may be reduced.

The primary purpose of this thesis is to investigate, describe, and thus understand, the phenomenon of the strategy-creation process, the process, content, and context in senior Welsh rugby clubs, 1990 - 2000. The inspiration for the research arose during a monumental decade of transformation to the Game of Rugby Union Football. The research questions concern evaluating the clubs’ strategy-creation process, and the reactions to the introduction of National Leagues and Professionalism. The process pursued was centred on a purposive sample of three nonprofit rugby clubs. In addition to an in-depth analysis of the general strategy management literature, reviews were conducted within the themes of small business, nonprofits and sporting organizations. A lack of prior research in the strategy action-outcomes in the nonprofits, sporting sector, particularly the rugby union environment, was a cause for concern. The general literature revealed clear differences of opinion between researchers about the relationship between organizational strategy, strategy-creation and outcomes. An interpretive approach was adopted, employing the validated theoretical framework by Bailey et al (2000), to collect, and analyse, ‘insider’ data from different levels of club respondents, and also from various club stakeholders. The content (outcomes) found that rugby clubs employed operational planning regularly during the playing season. Strategic planning had been used, but only on a few necessary occasions. The decision-making processes were found to have strong political and enforced choice dimensions, both pre- and post- 1995. The Introduction of Professionalism had caused the need for clubs to manage conflicting rugby and business objectives, and to re-appraise the influence of culture on decisions. However, it did not change the clubs’ long established priority of placing playing performance before financial performance. The context of the clubs’ turbulent external environment, coupled with the uncertainty and unpredictability of the Game, ensured an annual, seasonal struggle for survival for clubs operating in a niche market. These distinctive operating conditions strongly influence a rugby club’s strategy-creation. This thesis concludes by considering the theoretical and managerial implications of the findings arising from the study of non-profit rugby clubs.