Friday, March 14, 2008

Behind Closed Doors - Mondays with SMUrugby

With the conclusion of the rugby season, the City Boys have hit back to the books and been undergoing some internal re-organization of the team. With a new executive committee set to step up to take over from the committee of 2007/2008, we hope to see a stronger SMU side next season.

So while the Inter-University season is over and most of us all heading back to our books, we thought we give our readers a treat, and give you a peek to what SMUrugby training regime is like. Over the next few days, we will take you through our weekly routine and how we prepared ourselves for the 2008 Tri-Universities.

The team who boast of 30 active players constantly struggled with attaining a steady healthy turn out during trainings. Nevertheless, the team trained 3 times a week on Monday nights, Wednesdays nights and Friday late afternoons.

The reason for the rather irregular times of training was due to the difference in timetables of the players. At SMU, lessons usually end by 6.45pm and on Fridays by 3.15pm.

Unlike our other rivals like NUS and NTU, the deprivation of a rugby field within our school premises, proved to be a huge challenge that the team had to deal with. Hence, during the season, the team often had to make-do with whatever we could get.

For today, we will take you through our Monday’s training session.



Monday sessions usually sees a poor turn out. The team only has the school sports hall which is located at the SMU administration building from 6pm to 8pm, as that was the best possible slot we could get from the balloting process (within SMU, clubs have to ballot for the use of the sports hall). Hence, most of the boys who have classes till 6.45pm either join the session around 7pm or better still! Not bother themselves, by not turning up.

Nevertheless, the Monday session is usually the most slack and enjoyable. The boys do some ‘skills’ and cardio exercises. Playing a bit of soccer, basketball or even boxing(please refer to the video below) is definitely on the training manual, especially after a weekend’s game. Other times, the team does a bit of fitness and spends some time working their unit skills.

Imagine you are the captain - and you are about to run your backline moves and then you see this...


Amidst all the 'serious' work out and exercises, the team also takes time to mess around(as you probably figured) or even consider attempting crazy feats. Such as kickers Amos Siow and Josiah Goh aiming to put a rugby ball through the basketball net by attempting to do a place kick or drop kick from the other end of the court. Both of which never succeeded.

Another crazy feat attempted and witnessed, was when Tafa threw down his guard during line out training and issued a challenge to 'Big Daddy' Daniel Marc. The dispute was over who was the better jumper and the Big Daddy was appearing "full of himself" and confident that there can be no better jumper than himself. The former SMUrugby president then broke it down to Tafa, "... to prove it(you are a better jumper than I am) you got to show me you can either jump higher than me or do a slam dunk!"

Tafa chose the latter.... enjoy the video

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