I was fortunate to play school-boy rugby at a reasonable level, aided in no small part by a maths teacher coach who brought us training by “deploying the science of goals and measurement”, an extremely radical approach some 40 years ago. While most teams were told to simply “go out and play” or “run harder,” we had our tackle count, sprint times, times to ‘break-down’ logged, with appropriate improvement goals provided. This caused some of the less motivated and, shall I say, less mobile players to self de-select, and the overall impact was to produce a more motivated, mobile, speedier rugby team. Naturally, the team did well by local standards, and the ‘scientific method’ was emulated by a number of the local authorities.
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