Academy growth hand-in-hand with Ultimate Sevens breakout season

When the Ultimate Sevens Academy started back in 2013, few could have predicted that it would lead to a brand new global sevens competition.

It has been a long journey over the last 13 years, but the academy’s goal to develop sevens players in the UK has proven a fruitful one, expanding out into Europe and North America.

It has been at the crux of the development of the Ultimate Sevens, with Managing Director Barney Pascall excited to turn sevens into a supercharged pathway to get new fans and players into rugby, having started work with the academy in 2020.

“It’s amazing that many unions still have it [sevens] as a professional pathway and indeed elite level performance aspect of rugby union,” Pascall said in an interview with RugbyPass.

“But there are others that don’t.

“If you look at it through the lens of the ecosystem, including the Olympics, trying to maintain quality and increase quality, that’s a part and a role that we want to play.

“We’ve got this amazing elite-level competition now and we want to make sure they’re genuinely connected. We want this to grow Academy within the UK, which is obviously our biggest Academy at the moment.

“But how can we take the blueprint of that and move it to other parts of the world? We’re focusing in Europe to begin with and what we want to launch this year in other territories.

“[We don’t want to suddenly] lose the principle of the Academy, let’s not suddenly go places and go, this is ruthlessly high performance.

“How can we find people young that may or may not play rugby, if they do great, if they don’t great, bring them into an ecosystem where they can enjoy it, they can experience it, they can move up, they can have an opportunity, the lucky ones to play in this competition.

“Others might turn around and go, actually, XVs is more suited to me.That’s what we can be, an aggregator, if you like, for the sport of rugby and to bring new people into it.”

The Academy has already achieved several significant milestones in the last 12 months, with February seeing a successful Junior Sevens tournament in Lisbon, Portugal, with teams in U16s and U18s competing in both Girls and Boys competitions.

The Academy has also commenced a partnership with US Sports Scholarships to take programs to in the USA, taking advantage of the rapid growth of US college rugby.

Notably, in recent years the academy has also helped in the development of growing national teams, partnering with the Czech Rugby Union Women’s 7s National Team to help develop their U16-U20 squads.

The Academy has coalesced into the Ultimate Sevens, with 12 players selected as an ‘academy pick’ that accompanies each squad in the competition.

Among the academy players included was Josa Cevaceva, selected from the UK Armed Forces side who scored the first golden try in the tournament’s history in Cardiff for Foudre Bleue.

Joss O’Keefe has also been a notable academy inclusion for men’s title winners Clan Taran in Cardiff, with Pascall seeing for himself the immediate impact that exposure to a high-performance environment with a diverse melting pot of players in doing to these rising academy players.

“Credit belongs to the players for buying into this concept and embracing this multicultural melting pot,” Pascall added.

“The coaches and the coaching staff and the way they’ve gone about it, I cannot tip my cap more to the way that they’ve approached that. They’ve built a culture very, very quickly.

“There are people out there who’ve gone on rugby sevens tours or played in competitions; you turn up on a Friday and by the Sunday you’ve got best mates and you’ve got memories that last forever.

“Now, this is clearly at an elite level and the rugby and the performances is the key aspect here. But all of that authenticity plays through.

“I went upstairs in Cardiff to the old clubhouse, and I walk into the players having dinner and I’ve got Fijians, Australians, Scottish, Canadians dancing. Doing stuff in their teams that inevitably on the World Series probably isn’t happening as much because they’re all in their country [teams].

“There’s been quite a bit of cross-pollination. And then for the [academy] players that have been part of it, It’s awesome.

“It really is awesome to see him [Joss O’Keefe]. He had a birthday whilst he was in camp last week with all of these superstar rugby players from South Africa coming together and wishing him well.

“That’s an amazing story in itself. We’ve got to lean into that more.”

The active involvement of academy players directly in the squads is set to become even more valuable this Friday in Biarritz, as the teams gear up for a critical round of action before heading to London next week for the final.

With Pascall seeing the response in Cardiff, he believes the planning going into Ultimate Sevens and the changes made might suggest the competition is onto something, not just as a pathway for growing players, but as a valuable competition to fill space between the SVNS Series circuit.

“To see these faces and these players so keen to go again [after Cardiff], that was also really warming for us because it shows that they care,” Pascall said.

“At the moment, look, people are watching, people are coming. That’s really helpful and healthy for us. “That built and grew over the course of even a relatively short season this year because we know we want to go and scale bigger next year.

“We want to go up in terms of the number of events and the different territories, different countries that we’re in. That helps with that journey and that growth.”