A new era in player communication dawns in the East

Three internet-based “blogs” are proving to be a fantastic new way of keeping players in touch with activities at club and county level in East region. The “blogs” – special news-based websites – have been launched in the region in the past three months and all have proved to be a big hit with players, parents, and the wider rugby world.

The pioneer in this communication revolution was the girls’ section at Letchworth Garden City RFC who launched their blog (http://letchworthgirls.blogspot.com) in April. Team coaches and managers wanted to come up with a more effective of keeping players and parents in touch with what was happening at the club, and in the wider game, but none of the existing systems had the immediacy or flexibility needed.

The club website was good at covering major news items, but the amount of space it could reasonably be asked to devote the small details of daily team life of one team out of a dozen or more was limited. Printed newsletters took time to produce, were often out of date by the time they were printed, only reached those who were at that night’s training session (and rarely parents at all), and often went unread as they turned to pulp in the bottom of a muddy boot bag. And even e-mails had failed to hit the mark as girls often had some many different addresses. So something different was called for.

When a blog supporting the 2006 Herts Sevens tournament proved so effective, Letchworth decided to launch one just for the girls’ teams.

It has been an enormous hit. In three months there have been over 2,000 visits to the site. It has virtually eliminated the need for traditional paper newsletters, mailings, or even regular e-mails – and it has attracted a readership and interest in the club well beyond the 30 or so girls who play at Legends Lane. Many regular readers are logging in from outside the UK and stories from or about the ‘blog have been picked up and reused on rugby websites across the world. With the team also appearing in a recent IRB international coaching journal Letchworth’s Girls’ could claim to be one of the world’s highest profile junior sports teams!

Hot on the heels of this success blogs have also been started to support the work of Hertfordshire (http://hertsgirls.blogspot.com) and Eastern Counties. Both have been successful as well.

The Eastern Counties blog (http://www.easterncounties.girlsrugby.org.uk/) also covers adult women’s as well as girls’ rugby and has recorded over 500 hits in its first month – not bad for considering the time of year and for a new area that won’t actually put a team on the field until next season!

But perhaps this success should be no surprise. Blogs also fit in with the way girls do things. Communication is changing and today’s teenage girls main methods are text messaging, discussions groups - and blogs, either directly or via feeds to services such as MySpace, Windows Live, or Google Personal Page.

The range of material appearing on the blogs can be – and has been - huge. From simple “training tomorrow is at 6.30” to matches reports and feedback, news about forthcoming games and competitions, awards, interesting rugby-related stories, discussion about new promotional activities, videos, photographs, and much else besides. The Letchworth blog alone has published over 100 news items in the first three months in fact – on average one per day.

“That sounds a lot”, say the girls’ section manager John Birch, “but the items are normally quite short and its important to keep readers coming back. There is always something going in the world of rugby and you quickly find that there’s loads of things you can add.

“In fact you soon wonder how you coped before. County or regional bodies have a huge on-going task trying to keep in touch with players and parents, especially representative bodies who have the task of trying to make players feel part of what they are doing. This really can help solve a lot of that. Every club – every team – should have one!

“They are easy to use, the task can be shared with all coaches being able to contribute, they encourage debate, they are FREE (!), and they even save trees. What more could you want?”