The Hong Kong’s Girls’ Academy and Boys’ Podium teams travelled to Beihai, China last February to take part in a rugby training camp. The Hong Kong representative teams comprised of 29 of the most promising players from the National Age Grade squads who have shown potential to transition into the Hong Kong women’s and men’s HKSI Sevens programmes.

Over the course of the weekend, the boys and girls played a series of training games against provincial youth representative sides from Shandong, Hubei, Beijing and Inner Mongolia. These provincial youth teams spend seven months of the year in southern China where they live and train together full time with the same objective of transferring players into their senior national teams. With the Olympic Games looming, these young players have everything to prove in the hopes of joining the Hong Kong or China National squad before they head off to Japan next year.

More than half of the home squad of boys and girls that went to China were on their first rugby tour outside of Hong Kong – enabling them to get a taste for the international tournaments and team environments that lie ahead in their rugby careers. The teams travelled to Beihai on a seven-hour-long high speed train, giving them plenty of time to complete various team building and analysis tasks set by coaches as part of their ‘education and exposure to a tour environment.’ Players were asked to create their own team itineraries as well as completing individual video analysis of previous games. During the course of the weekend, players were also asked to focus on game day behaviours and ways to maximize recovery between matches to help prevent injury and put themselves in the best position to perform in matches.

Despite the Chinese players’ physical dominance, the wily Hong Kong girls and boys used their superior rugby knowledge to outwit and outplay their opposition. The girls had good wins against two of the Shandong teams and Beijing, and the boys were also able to secure victories over Hubei, Shandong and Beijing.

Sam Feausi, Head Coach of the Women’s Academy team, was impressed with her team’s performance.

“It was great to see the younger players such as Kaisla Majapuro, Micayla Baltazar and in particular Sabay Lynam stepping up into the next level. On the other end of the spectrum, it was evident and pleasing to see that a number of the older girls from the Academy are ready to knock on the door for the senior team.”

The Podium boys also made coach Mark Wright proud with their consistent composure and confidence going into a tournament as underdogs. 

“It was great to see the Podium boys step up to the challenge of playing against predominantly older and physically bigger teams. It was also a great learning experience for the boys in the importance of being mentally ready for every game, especially towards the end of a 7s tournament.  All the boys played really well but two to note were Billy Rigby, who was consistently excellent throughout, and speedster Ivan Chan Ka Yeung, who had a fine performance in the last game.”

Games aside, the main objective of the tour was to develop and expose the young players to the type of high performance environment that they can expect in the senior programmes. Coaches were impressed with the confidence and maturity of the players and there will definitely be a few Academy and Podium names mentioned in the HKRU office over the coming months as these young guns continue to improve.