NEWS

MLR Grassroots | Toronto Arrows, High School

Written by Joe Harvey

Having announced Grassroots Development Incentives last fall, this week Major League Rugby is highlighting three of the programs that have excelled in recent history. Yesterday, New England Free Jacks’ Tom Kindley discussed the work he has done in New England.

Today, majorleague.rugby has spoken to Cory Hector, Director of  the Toronto Arrows Academy, about the Toronto Arrows’ program and how they are faring.

Last October, Toronto announced their partnership with Rugby Ontario to launch the Ontario Blues – Junior Arrows Academy, an offseason program to provide selected age-grade Ontario athletes with the opportunity to train and learn from provincial, national, and professional coaches in order to optimize their rugby capabilities.

An extension of Rugby Ontario’s Winter Skills Academy, players will receive an additional 26 sessions per year, operating from regional hubs in the province. In addition to this, there is also an emphasis on coaching development in order to contribute to providing the next generation of Canadian rugby coaches.

Having begun the organization and implementation of the Academy program with the shadow of Covid-19 behind them, Hector says that he feels that good progress has already been made despite disruption.

“It would have been easy to sit on our hands and just wait for rugby to come back,” Hector said. “By being fairly proactive and getting some of these pieces in place has been really good and I feel as though it has been really positive. 

“In particular, it has been good working with the group in Ottawa because the east of the province hasn’t always been mirrored with the west. Being able to tie in with them and being able to align with them thanks to a combined curriculum and that comes off the back of the work we did in the early parts of Covid.

“The evolution that we have seen has been positive and is as a result of our two-pronged approach of coach and player development.

“We are able to offer feedback on coaching, on training plans and I think that is massive. For someone who came through the Ontario program as a coach, it is something that I never got, and it only benefits the players. 

“Despite all the stops and starts, the players will have gotten better, so it has been successful and has even shown us there we need to make a few changes in order to press on further when there is less disruption caused by Covid-19.”

Having coached provincially from the U16 to U19 levels, Hector is also the head coach of the University of Guelph Gryphons and led the side to a Ontario University Athletics title in 2016. 

The Ontario Blues’ influence on the Arrows is already clean to see, with 17 current players have come through their program prior to going professional. 

As time goes by, one of the biggest challenges ahead of Hector and the Junior Arrows Academy is aligning the calendar in order to allow for players to play enough rugby in what is a short space of time is, as a result of the adverse weather conditions in Ontario.

“We might only see players through a few competitions where they play a handful of games,” Hector said. “With us having such a short outdoor season, the challenge is that when it is time to move indoors, it is the same for every other sport. 

“So, finding facilities during that time, as well as ones that are cost effective, we have had to be creative. I think we have come up with some really good solutions, like using a basketball gym for handling exercises and a wrestling room to do collision work.

“In Ontario, we typically try and cram all our rugby into a few months. In a typical season you might not get on field until April, which is around the time high school rugby starts, and the season starts in May, with club and provincial running simultaneously from May until August. We go from then until June and then the Ontario Blues program really picks up. 

“The addition of the Ontario Blues/Junior Arrows Academy program creates structured training for the selected athletes through October to April while still giving players programmed downtime and adequate breaks.

“For me, the most important thing is that we have tried to push is that whether it is our senior group or the younger groups, the idea is to work collaboratively with the different programs that support us. We fundamentally believe that given our geography and climate, our athletes don’t have the opportunities to play as much rugby as others around the world.

“By creating these programs, we are trying to level that playing field with the amount of rugby these athletes will be playing. But we don’t want to be doing that by cannibalizing the other pathways around us and being really deliberate in our process.”