Two initiatives promoted this week in the wake of another disappointing Six Nations Championship campaign can come together to close Scottish rugby's skills gap, according to one of the sport's leading coaches.
Sean Lineen was instrumental in bringing touch rugby to Scotland in the mid-90s, and the head coach of Glasgow Warriors recognises that the handling skills of professional players are not what they should be.
That is partly down to facilities and climate, which make it difficult to put in quality training, but to a large extent it dates back to how players' skills are developed at an earlier age.
Consequently Lineen saw something opportune in the announcement of the national roll out of a programme promoting rugby in schools coinciding with organisers of Scotland's Touch Rugby League announcing that the deadline for entries to this season's Glasgow competition had been extended to try to give more people a chance to sample the sport.
"These are key areas for rugby's development," said Lineen. "We need to increase participation in schools and we need to get more people to realise how easy Touch is to play and organise and what it does for skills."
The Scottish Widows Rugby Champions scheme being rolled out nationally after a successful pilot in Central Region which saw the number of schools rugby teams there rise by 23%, aims to incentivise individuals in schools to promote the sport. Yet as Lineen acknowledges many teachers who may have some interest in rugby but are put off by the technical knowledge required and, perhaps even more so by the physicality of the sport, could be encouraged to coach Touch.
"Touch is purely about the skill of rugby," he explained. "It takes away the contact and encourages everything else like running off the ball, passing, support lines and communication and there's no kicking either, but it is very easy to organise."
In short it is rugby's version of goalposts for jerseys' and Lineen's own experience of how he first spotted a player who has gone on to represent the British & Irish Lions demonstrates how it helps identify talent.
"It was at our first national schools Touch tournament that I first saw Chris Cusiter play for Robert Gordon's. He was a skinny little thing, but you could see that he had it," said Lineen, who originally hails from New Zealand, a country where coaches have often attributed the high skill levels of their players to playing Touch as youngsters.
Allied to the bid to encourage more participation in the sport in state schools it is obvious, then, that this offers a user friendly solution to Scotland's relatively small talent pool and, to an extent, those difficulties posed by climate and poor facilities.
Comparisons have been made with Wales and it was remarkable to see how a group of players who failed miserably at the World Cup got on a roll as soon as they gathered some momentum.
That is at least partly down to rugby being the national game and therefore the one most talented youngsters in the country want to play. They in turn have star status from an early age and are used to seeing themselves as winners within their communities, so when things start going well they revel in it.
By contrast the vast majority of Scotland's schoolboy sports "stars" opt for their national sport, something all the more natural because football is the easiest game to organise.
SRU officials running the Rugby Champions' scheme say it has built in flexibility that would allow Touch to be a central part of a school's rugby programme and in doing so they are surely greatly improving the chances of maximising participation.
Meantime those wishing to try this version of the sport or who are just interested in seeing how it is played - and apparently relatively few of those currently playing in the leagues are members of rugby clubs - can find out more at www.touch-scotland.com.
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