13 Jan 2010 | Rugby
FREEPORT, Grand Bahama — From mountain climbing to barber shop singing – Mark Rawlings is a sportsman of many parts. And now he is adding the role of ambassador to his repertoire.
The newly-appointed youth development officer at Freeport Rugby Football Club (pictured) is heading out into the schools with a mission to win young people and their physical education teachers over to a sport relatively little known on Grand Bahama but played by millions worldwide.
The 22-year-old Brit may be young but he has plenty to offer youngsters interested in taking up the sport. He is a player himself, holds several coaching certificates and is a qualified referee. He also has experience this side of the Atlantic having spent months coaching children in Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago.
He wants to get more young Bahamians involved at the Settlers Way-based rugby club. Contrary to many people’s belief the club is not just for foreigners and already most of the first team is Grand Bahama born and bred. Mark wants to get the next generation of players started early.
He has already been to Bishop Michael Eldon High School and other schools will quickly follow. Phase One of his “Start Rugby, Grand Bahama” campaign offers six weeks coaching for each school which takes part followed by special tag rugby tournament for senior kids in a month or two’s time in which youngsters will be able to show what they have learned in competition with other schools.
Each of those taking part will be invited for extra training at the rugby club on Monday and Friday evenings.
Once Phase One is complete he will turn his attention to the under-15 age group with similar coaching programmes and a competitive event at the end.
“This programme looks to develop teamwork, leadership and discipline in a fun and enjoyable setting,” said rugby club president Rob Speller. “It will also improve the kids’ motor skills, such as passing, catching, and reading the game, all of which are transferable to and from many other popular sports.
“We want to involve parents and teachers in the organisation and coaching. They will find it fun and it will help sustain the sport on the island for the foreseeable future.”
The Freeport club’s successes attract much less attention than other sports on the island but are outstanding nonetheless. It won the 2008 Bahamas Cup as well as the 2008 Bahamas Championships. Its facilities are the best on the island with extensive match and practice pitches and a clubhouse which houses changing rooms and showers as well as a social centre. It regularly hosts visiting teams from the US.
“It’s been great to get started,” said Mark. “I know the kids who take part will enjoy it and they will be getting coaching to the highest standards set by the International Rugby Board. It is a contact sport and it is very competitive as anyone who comes to the club on Saturday to watch us play Kellogg’s Business School from the US will see. But it also teaches anger management and leads to strong character growth generally.”
Mark has taken time off from the UK’s world famous Loughborough University where he is taking politics with media to help out in Freeport. But the university is chiefly known for the large number of top class sports players and coaches who have begun their first class careers there.
He is used to pioneering projects. In fact his coaching stint in Trinidad and Tobago was the first of its kind in that country and required a diplomatic approach as well as a lot of enthusiasm.
He ended up coaching primary as well as high school children, some of them disabled, as well more challenging students. “One of the more rewarding and unique experiences was coaching in a young offenders institute in Trinidad where many of the kids had not played the sport before,” Mark added.
10 Nov 2009 | Rugby
Dear Members, Friends and James Bond fans,
On behalf of the Freeport Rugby and Football Club we invite you to our first Annual James Bond evening “A View to a Thrill.”
This will be a major fundraising event to help in the ever present challenges of keeping our cherished non-profit organisation afloat in these financially difficult times.
Our Club has gone from strength to strength providing more and more young people with a stable and reliable place to practice their skills but providing this environment comes with an ever increasing cost.
These past couple of years we needed more space, we got it. We needed more equipment, we got it. We now need to be able to keep pace with the upward spiral in cost of everyday maintenance and unfortunately the need to rely on supportive, community minded people is necessary for us to keep striving forward as a club we can all be proud of.
With all that said we invite you to join us for what should be a spectacular evening full of fun, surprises and laughter…
Don’t forget, the more Bond trivia you know the better your chance of walking away with the Grand Prize.
It is important for us to know numbers in advance for the night so please let us know how many tickets you need by November 14th, 2009.
See you then,
Tony Johns (otherwise known as “M”)
10 Nov 2009 | Rugby
The Bahamas men’s national rugby team has quite a task ahead, with the North American Caribbean Rugby Association (NACRA) Sevens Championships rapidly approaching.
The championships, set for November 14-15 in Mexico City, Mexico, serves as a qualifier for more than three tournaments next year. A win will automatically qualify the Bahamas men’s team for the Commonwealth Games, USA Sevens and the Pan American Games. A fifth place finish at this tournament or better will qualify Team Bahamas for the Central American and Caribbean Games.
Director of the Bahamas Rugby Football Union (BRFU) Elystan Miles knows that a lot is at risk for the squad, but is confident that they can win the tournament.
“This is the highest stakes we have every played for,” said Miles. “This is the first time that we have ever done it like this, where there are so many different tournaments to qualify for. That is why we are pretty determined to win this. We haven’t seen Guyana, Trinidad or Jamaica and these are pretty much the powerhouses in the region. If everyone fires on all cylinders, I think we have a good chance of winning the whole thing. We have some of the best players in the region. Four guys on our team have played on the West Indies team. That is four of the seven so we have an excellent team here.
“The team has been training very hard, but we also know that Guyana is a very tough team to beat. They have been training hard, so has Trinidad and Tobago, but we’re in the best shape that we have ever been in, even though I am pretty sure that these other countries are going to be too.”
The Bahamas will play out of Pool A with Guyana and the Cayman Islands. For the first time, The Bahamas will also enter a women’s squad. The team is expected to play against host country Mexico, which will also be entering a women’s team for the first time. Other teams include Trinidad and Tobago, the Cayman Islands, Jamaica and Guyana.
Miles knows that it is going to be a tough debut for the women’s squad, however he believes that they can compete with the other teams in the region. He said: “It is going to be a real fight for the girls. There are five women teams competing, all the other teams they have competed in the past, but really, we are looking for them to place. We know that Guyana is really strong in both men and women and they are pretty experienced. Our men, they have a chance of winning the tournament, but this is the first time for our women’s team. If they can go out there and get a couple of hits in, we would be very happy.
“We had a team come over from the states to play them in the summer and they did well. The biggest challenge for them is getting competition. Because we only have one team here, it is very hard for the girls to find competition. They’ve been training and have played some games with the men. The men’s team have been pretty hard on them, but they’ve been holding up pretty well.”
The executive members will announce the team members on Saturday after the final seven-a-side match, at the Winton Rugby Field. The match is scheduled to start at 1:00 p.m. ( Note this is an old post form oct 29th so please don’t show up saturday !!)
10 Nov 2009 | Rugby
courtsey J Nicholson football365.com
Whatever Happened To…Away Shirts?
Let’s have a recap. Until recently, you wore your regular strip on every occasion possible, only changing to an alternative when you were away from home and your regular colours were the same or very similar as the home team.
This all made sense for a hundred or more years. When Arsenal went to Old Trafford they’d wear yellow and blue and Liverpool would wear white with red collar and cuffs. This sensible idea has recently been abandoned in favour of a completely random system based on absolutely nothing other than having three different shirts to sell to fans.
There are no home and away shirts now because any shirt can be worn on any occasion. The home side can change strip and the away side do so when unnecessary. So it is that Arsenal played at Wolves in navy blue and all because navy blue makes Arshavin looks less like a lesbian hockey teacher…or something.
Home and away has been replaced by a more clinical first, second and third strip concept. It’s anarchy and it pleases no-one.
Whatever Happened to….Not Showing Pain?
Until not all that long ago, if some big hairy gibbon kicked you up into the air, you would get up as though nothing had happened. “You think you hurt me? Pah! Bigger men than you have failed, son, get away with you before I lose my temper,” you’d say, brusquely, even if only your sock was keeping your leg attached to your foot. You would rather pass out from the pain than let the man know he’d hurt you. Showing pain was showing weakness.
Then sometime in the late 90s, being a wuss became fashionable. Outpourings of grief were de rigeur as men got in touch with their feminine side – but not any of the good feminine bits, not the multi-tasking, multiple orgasms and sensitive nipples, oh no, we just got the PMT elements of over-reaction and over-wrought emotion.And so footballers began to contort their faces and throw themselves to the ground in anguish at the mere sound of a defender’s footstep.
And today we have the ridiculous spectacle of seeing extraordinary physical specimens of men flapping like a run-over seagull after the merest brush with a defender, sometimes signalling for the stretcher or an ambulance only to miraculously recover two minutes later. Others just walk off if they’ve been hurt and refuse to play on. Man up you simpering nancy boys or hand your genitals in on the way out.
Whatever Happened to…The Sliding Tackle?
The sliding tackle was magnificent. It could only be done on rainy days on a muddy pitch. A defender would begin a tackle ten yards away from the opposition player and using the greasy pitch, would gather pace like a speed skater, ploughing a potato trench of a furrow, taking both man and ball simultaneously to huge applause.
This has stopped recently because any tackle which touches, might touch, potentially could have touched or in an unlikely set of circumstances involving a goat on a bike with a machete, could have been dangerous, has now been outlawed, while the shamefully girlish crime of shirt-pulling is 100% allowable. Shame.
Whatever Happened to…Ex Footballers Opening a Sports Shop?
Back when top-flight players earned just double the average wage – which was typical up until the early 80s – when their career was over, they had to do something else to earn a living. Naturally a sports shop seemed like a good idea.
This was before the existence of the giant emporiums to polyester in soul-less retail parks, staffed by the clinically depressed and inhabited by gaunt pukey-faced boys of the under-class and their fat, pregnant girlfriends. At the time there were still small, family-run shops on your high street and not just identical branches of multi-national corporations run by faceless corporate-speak managers called Gavin.
Such great little shops would sell you everything from dart flights to a jock strap to a table tennis ball. Quite often the ex-player was behind the till. On Teesside, it was Willie Maddren’s sport shop we all went to. Dour players such as Leeds full-back Terry Cooper bought a newsagent, while the more flamboyant would open a boutique. Malcolm MacDonald had one in Newcastle’s Newgate Shopping Centre – a hideous 1960s built pish and vomit lashed concrete alcove.Bestie and Jamie Pollock (surely the only time those two players have been mentioned in the same breath) both had clothes stores for a while.
These days it’s impossible to imagine nipping into a sports shop to buy some dubbing for your caser and being served by Michael Owen. Though I can see Jimmy Bullard running a fruit and veg stall, oddly enough.
Whatever Happened to…Just Running Out and Starting A Game?
It went like this. We sat in the local pub until ten to three boozing. We’d saunter into the ground just before 3pm; the players ran out, tossed a coin and kicked off. Easy.Today, it’s all so complicated. Now players have to line up in the tunnel 15 minutes beforehand. If it’s an international, each player has a kid at their side, both looking vaguely embarrassed. Why?
Where does this inexhaustible supply of kids come from? Why are they often so weird-looking? Are only fat kids allowed? League matches must also have a kid or two per side in the tunnel. On Sunday one of Chelsea’s was a young girl, maybe 11, who had to stand to the front and side of John Terry as he arranged his tackle in his shorts. A lovely bucolic sight. Once on the pitch they have to negotiate the mutant creature in a fake fur suit who does…stuff for some reason that no-one understands nor asked for. After a photo shoot, the kids and the players have to shake each other’s hands in single file before the kids can leave and we can then get on with the serious business of having a minute’s silence, the breaking of which is a crime against God second only to not wearing a poppy.
It’s surprising the players are not asked put up some flat-pack furniture, prepare an artichoke dip and sketch a post-impressionist portrait of the referee to decide who kicks off. Just bloody get on with it!
We’re here to see football, not small children, fake fur animals with giant heads, dancing girls, parachutists or the local radio DJ hosting a spank the monkey competition for a bag of meat.
Whatever Happened To ….The Pink?
The Pink was a local paper which came out on Saturday early evening with all the football, rugby and racing results. In some places it was green, occasionally blue. You’d leave the ground, get down your local club for some subsidised ale and by the time you’d got your first pint in, the Pink was on the streets and being sold by a bloke called Alf, aged 75, with a roll-up permanently on his lip. Same bloke, week in week out.It was essential for the football geek because it gave you results and tables and it was the only source of such info because you’d missed the teleprinter on Grandstand or World Of Sport coming out of the ground. Radios were too big and heavy to carry. There was no other way to know the results.
Think about that. No other way to know what had happened until Match Of The Day or the Sundays paper. Okay, there was. At most grounds there was a bloke who put the half-time scores on a hoarding with a big hook-on number beside a letter. Each letter corresponded to a game in the programme. I’m not making this up, honest. But if you didn’t have the programme this was useless and even if you did, the bloke would deliberately put up wrong scores and rarely did the full-times.
In the pre-digital wi-fi age, you might have been out of touch with the rest of the world, but on the up side, no-one walked into you in the street because they were on their freaking Blackberry oblivious to their greater responsibility to society not to be a dick.What happened to The Pink was the internet and all other forms of mobile digital voodoo. But not even the iPhone has got an app to turn it into a pink, poorly printed, flimsy newspaper, and until it does, I’m not buying one.
Whatever Happened To….Talking About Football Without Talking About Money
Come to this site on any day of the week and you’ll find people stalking about the money their club has or hasn’t spent; talking about the difference between net and gross. The maths nerds have taken over. What are we people, accountants? I never wanted football to become about money rather than sport, competition and art. We used to sit over a pint of Stones Best bitter and consider how players had played, not their ratio of earnings to contribution. Incredible as it might now seem, we never talked about money at all. It was all about the sport itself. This all changed with sponsorship in the early 80s. Once your club had taken the big bucks from Heritage Hampers, it altered everything.
