Southland rugby changing with the times

At a time when all sports are fighting to retain and attract an audience, Rugby Southland is endeavoring to understand what their audience wants.

Disruption is a constant in today’s society. Sport is not immune.

For the longest time, sport could rely on its participants to bend and shape themselves in its own image. Build it and they will come.

Facilities and competitions remained season after season - unchanged and unbending - maintaining a granite stoicism reminiscent of El Capitan.

But sport can no longer rely on a ready market waiting outside for the door to open, like a Briscoes sale.

As with any product, the sector is becoming increasingly responsive to the needs of a society which has less time and more competing options.

The key to success in the future will be understanding the customer, and the key to understanding the customer is to take into account all the factors which might drive them, from their competence and confidence in their own ability, to how participating makes them feel about themselves and others.

Which brings us back to rugby, which is becoming increasingly comfortable in what can be a vulnerable position, not unlike the bottom of a ruck.

The most obvious problem with asking people what they think is that they might tell you; and what they might tell might not be good. Like the bottom of 1950s ruck, you might be in for a good kicking. Which makes it even more important to ask.

In 2017 Sport Southland assisted Rugby Southland with developing and understanding a survey of senior players, asking a range of questions about the game, including the make-up of competition structures, sub-union rugby, pathways, whether premier and division one should combine, along with a bunch of other stuff.

This was followed up in October, 2018 by a survey which went to a broader range of stakeholders, including supporters, coaches, players and administrators.

In all, 850 responses were received, with 523 people completing the full 2018 survey, a hearty result and one which shows how passionate the Southland public are about one of our leading winter codes.

The results themselves were quite compelling and if you are involved in the game and are interested, hopefully they have been communicated back to you in some form or other.

For those not so intimately involved in the game, but who may be interested in the process, the survey supported nicely a series of three club rugby forums which Rugby Southland conducted in the offseason.

And when we talk about being uncomfortable, consider that the 2018 survey respondents provided an average score for their competition of 5.8 out of 10. Not disastrous, sure, but that includes the Premier and Division two players who rated their competitions 4.4 out of 10.

The numbers are sobering, but what the survey and forums also provided was the context from which changes could be made.

And, while Rugby Southland has been criticized in the past for filing consultation in the bottom draw, changes have been made.

From the survey and forums, it was clear that people don’t want rugby scheduled over long weekends, or the opening weekend of the duck shooting season.

Country players asked for more consideration to be given to the challenges they faced around travel, work commitments and the motivation required to unlace the work boots at the end of a long week and pull on the footy boots.

Changing lifestyles, work and family commitments all need to be factored in when developing club competitions, the feedback said.

Rugby Southland club development officer Bob Cullen, a man as quietly passionate about the grassroots game as anyone you might meet south of the McNab turn off, has just returned from presenting the results of the survey to his counterparts from across the country.

Crucially, he can point to a number of changes, from avoiding duckshooting, to evening out the number of teams in each competition, as evidence that the union is listening and reacting.

By combining premier and division one for the early part of the season, country players have less need to empty their petrol tanks – their own and their farm vehicles’ – in search of higher honours.

Has every issue been addressed? No. That's not how life works. Rugby will need to evolve to face challenges little and large, not least of which is the fact that having 30 clubs for a population of 100,000 people is not sustainable.

But that’s a chat for another survey, and another day.