RWC2015 will leave a lasting legacy: Grainger

The Rugby Football Union is aiming to use the Rugby World Cup to ensure that the tournament has a lasting legacy for the game of rugby and boosts participation in the sport.

Rugby Development Director for the RFU, Steve Grainger MBE, is hopeful that the competition will excite and inspire people to get involved in the game.

Grainger took the job in 2011 and he and the RFU have halted the decrease in participation in rugby.

The RFU now want to use the Rugby World Cup as a catalyst to increase the popularity of the sport on all levels.

“With the Rugby World Cup coming up, we want to make sure that we will excite more people and we know that we will inspire more people to get involved in the game,” he told Talking Rugby Union.

“Like many sports we have been losing participants and we have stemmed that decline in the game and that’s been out major focus since launching a strategy back in October 2012.

“We have been investing in facilities, getting more schools playing rugby union, developing more coaches, getting people to play more touch rugby and bringing 16-24 year olds back into the game.

“We really believe this will be a truly fantastic tournament and of course we all hope England are going to lift the trophy, but more importantly to us, is that we get more people involved in our great game.”

The RFU is committing an additional investment of £10m to help over 500 clubs across the country resulting in £34m total spend to improve their clubhouses and pitches.

Along with £1m investment in 6,500 newly qualified referees and coaches and 5,000 additional club volunteers – the RFU has recorded record attendances of 35,000 on courses over the last year, and that number is still growing.

In addition to this, to coincide with the start of the World Cup, September will see the 400^th school joining the RFU’s All Schools programme, which has introduced Rugby to non-playing state secondary schools and aims to reach 750 Schools by 2019.

Grainger has always been involved with encouraging sport development and he had huge success when he was chief executive of the Youth Sport Trust for six years.

He is more than aware that grass roots rugby matters and is sure that the ‘backbone’ of rugby in this country will not go under the radar during the World Cup.

Grainger added: “I think one of the things you learn when you are involved in sports development at the Youth Sports Trust is that planning before a major event is so critical. That is a simple principal of sports development.

“We have done that around the Rugby World Cup and we want to make sure all the great work in our rugby clubs, all of which is driven by some incredible volunteers, is given what we believe is the profile which it really deserves.

“We want to encourage as many people in local communities to go down to local rugby clubs and watch the games and really to discover that, despite the myth, rugby is very inclusive sport.”

The RFU will be hoping that the World Cup will have a similar effect on the country as the London Olympic Games in 2012 did. The games captivated a nation and encouraged youngsters to get involved in a wide variety of sports and Grainger believes there will be lasting legacy in rugby same affect after the World Cup concludes in October.

“I think that the Rugby World Cup is the third biggest sporting event in the world behind the Olympics and the football world cup,” he said.

“Its happening here in our country, spread across 13 different venues in 10 cities and that has got to give us a unique opportunity to really get the nation behind it.  Every game will be screened live on television so massive opportunities for people across the country to engage with the tournament.”

It is clear that after the Olympic Games new initiatives were taken across a variety of sports to increase participation.  

Grainger wants the same thing to happen in rugby and he knows that the sport is on the rise with the recent inclusion of Rugby in the Olympics for Rio 2016.

He added: “We will obviously use the success of the tournament to deliver over the next world cup cycle. We are saying on a lot of our measurements that we want to see the growth of the game sustained through to the 2019 World Cup in Japan.

“We have got some other exciting things coming. Rugby is in the Olympic Games next year in Rio for the first time. Both our men and women have already qualified for that tournament so we will be in the Rugby 7s.

“Next summer in Manchester, we will be hosting the Under 20 Junior World Championships which is where many of the current stars in the current England team have come through. They we replaying in the 2011 and 2012 World Championships and now they will be appearing on world stage so lots of things to look forward too!”