CAPE TOWN – Stormers assistant coach Labeeb Levy says that while their players are of course not rugby ready, the innovative approaches they’ve followed to ensure their skills don’t slip have been promising.
During a digital meeting yesterday, the skills coach talked the media through some of the tactics they’ve used in that department in recent weeks, including weekly or biweekly challenges for the guys to do at home during the lockdown.
“Every week I send them a video of about three or four individual skills to do. They then do it and send videos of them doing it,” Levy said.
“The first week we focused on ball-familiarisation skills. Every fortnight, sometimes weekly, I’d send them tasks or challenges to do then we’d have a competition with a weekly winner."
“Last week the challenge was to come up with your own creative skill. It’s quite amazing what some of the players can come up with, things you’d never really think of."
"Salmaan Moerat was throwing bags of potatoes onto a truck, some guys did a lot of wall passes, another guy was on a trapeze and passing balls."
“What was quite nice was to see the variety and diversity in the group. Bongi (Mbonambi), for example, would be passing and then you see his child hanging from his leg. Every day is different for everyone, the parents in the group have to plan their day differently, for example."
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Levy added that the High Performance Centre at the team’s training base in Bellville has been declared a medical facility and is hopeful that this will allow for players to get back to fine-tuning their rugby-specific regime soon.
“The players aren’t very rugby ready.
“The rugby preparation will only kick in once we have a date. Our facility at the HPC has now been declared a medical facility, so we’re using that as part of the plan to get guys rugby ready."
“All the guys who have come back from injury and who have niggles can hopefully start coming in from next week to do some work and hopefully we can work towards individuals coming in and then small groups, but we’re of course guided by regulations.”