LONG READ How training methods are changing with the rise of the hybrid player

Since its inception as a codified sport, one of rugby’s great selling points has been that it is a game for all body types. Whether you’re short and chunky, long and lanky, or diminutive and fleet-footed, there has always been a place for you on the pitch.

The explosion of professionalism in 1995 narrowed that point of entry. At the top end of the game, players – whatever their position – needed to meet new physical standards. Strength and conditioning became central, athleticism became measurable, and the margin for physical weakness shrank.

Yet even now, the game still carries traces of its old variety. When Cheslin Kolbe and Ben Tameifuna can both operate at elite level, rugby appears to retain at least some of its promise that different shapes and sizes still belong. But something deeper is happening beneath the surface.

The rise of the “hybrid” player – forwards who distribute like backs, centres who pack down in the scrum, locks who move like loose forwards – is often framed as a tactical evolution. In reality, it is first and foremost a coaching and conditioning story. The hybrid isn’t simply emerging because coaches want one. He is being deliberately built.

At the Sharks, David Williams – formerly the team’s skills coach and now general manager – sees the shift as a response to how modern rugby is played and managed. “I think it comes from a lot of the influence of yellow cards and red cards, because of the safety nature of the game,” he says. “It’s sort of being forced upon by the changing nature of how the game is viewed physically and the nature of the laws that we have around safety.

“Just about every game has a player sent off for a spell, or you lose a guy to concussion. If you’ve got someone else who can slot into multiple roles you’ve got an advantage.”

Those pressures reshape training environments. The game now lives in transition rather than in rigid phases. “The biggest volume of most games now is in the transitions, when the ball suddenly changes hands,” Williams explains. The old separation between forwards rehearsing set pieces while backs run strike plays is disappearing.

“If you want to be a good attacking side,” he adds, “you need to have forwards who can move the ball at speed.”

Esterhuizen, in his view, embodies the model. “Andre’s a generational talent. He’s just a model athlete of what you want in a franchise. He’d walk into any team on the planet.”

Coaching sessions are increasingly blended. Skills once reserved for specialists are now spread across the squad. “We do a lot of work with the ball with both forwards and backs interlinking,” Williams says.

The result is visible in players like Andre Esterhuizen – a centre capable of operating in forward-heavy roles for both the Sharks and the Springboks. His size makes him an obvious candidate, but Williams argues it’s something else that separates him.

“It’s all very well having an athlete who ticks the boxes physically,” he says. “What you need is someone who gets the nuances of both positions. You need to have a really good rugby brain.”

Williams believes that’s why true hybrids remain rare. “You don’t want guys who can simply do a job. They must add value in both positions.”

Similar examples are emerging across international rugby. England’s Ben Earl and Henry Pollock increasingly blur traditional positional definitions. France have gone further still, fielding Charles Ollivon in the second row while expecting him to function as a mobile, high-work-rate athlete in open play.

To understand how this is possible, you have to move away from tactics and toward the gym and training field.

Former France performance lead Thibault Giroud believes the roots lie in how young players are developed. “They start to train a lot earlier in terms of high performance,” he says. “Now you see a lot of the boys going to international standards when they are 18, 19, 20.”

Because players enter performance systems younger, coaches can shape them more precisely. “You can actually start to develop them very specifically,” Giroud says. “You can almost make the type of athlete that you want. Everything that you develop since a young age has got to be transferable to the field.”

That idea sits at the centre of modern conditioning. “It’s easy as a performance coach to say, okay, he’s faster, he’s stronger, but can he actually transfer that to the field?” Giroud asks. “You develop players that you can transfer physical ability to the game plan. We’re not developing players as a specific position. We develop players as a profile. You train profile, not position.”

The change is even visible in how power is trained. “During decades we were training the boys vertically,” Giroud says. “Now we train horizontally.”

That is how a player like Ollivon can operate in the second row while retaining loose-forward mobility, an outcome of changing training methodologies as much as tactical innovation.

Horizontal force – acceleration, repeated bursts, movement through space – matters more than pure vertical strength. Conditioning has followed a similar path, with less emphasis on basic endurance and more focus on power endurance and speed endurance that mirror the demands of modern play.

The effect is packs that move differently. “Now in every position you need to be able to do both,” Giroud says. “You look at the pack, with the exception of props, they pretty much all look the same.”

That is how a player like Ollivon can operate in the second row while retaining loose-forward mobility, an outcome of changing training methodologies as much as tactical innovation.

But professional rugby has different demands. “Do they want to watch a game that 100% includes everyone or do they want to watch unbelievable athletes doing incredible things?” he asks. “Rugby is a business. The teams with the best athletes will win.”

And, in Giroud’s eyes, the spectacle is worth it. “If you ask my opinion, I think rugby has never been better. People want to see speed. People want to see power. When you see these massive guys who can catch and pass at pace, clear a ruck, get up, make an intercept, accelerate through contact and then sprint to the line, that is what people pay money to see.”

The hybrid player, then, is not an accident of selection. He is the outcome of a system that prioritises transfer, adaptability and game-specific athletic development. Coaches are no longer building props, centres or locks in isolation; they are building profiles capable of surviving – and thriving – in a faster, more complex game.

The real evolution isn’t that rugby suddenly discovered hybrid athletes. It’s that rugby learned how to train them.