Many of you might have heard through the grapevine or even seen at the club that for the 2005 season the CR have hired a new coach. Australian Grant Dwyer has been recruited as coach and has been entrusted with the task of moulding and shaping a relatively young team into a force to be reckoned with this season.

Grant comes to the CR with a wide and varied experience as a player (in both rugby league and union) and a coach in his native Queensland, where he started his career as a half back (scrum half), before switching to becoming an inside centre. Since 1998 he has been actively involved in coaching and player development with Queensland Rugby and since 2000 has been conducting level 1 and level 2 coaching courses. During the last 5 years Grant has coached a variety of teams.

Reviewing these qualifications a question that immediately comes to mind is what motivated Grant to take up this coaching assignment with CR in Sri Lanka? To which he answers, “to be able to coach a team full time and be somewhere I can make a significant impact towards developing the standard of rugby”. While reviewing his choices and options he was surprised to note that although Sri Lanka has being playing rugby for over 100 years, she only ranks 56th in the world. This could definitely be improved and having seen the recently concluded sevens tournament, Grant is optimistic of these chances as there is much potential among the local players. And among his goals this season is to develop and improve on the form of 40 CR players who can then contribute towards a better Sri Lankan team.

Although at first Grant had been a little nervous about coming half way across the world and taking on the task of coaching the CR team, he has been pleasantly surprised as to how well he and his coaching methods have been accepted by the players. He attributes part of this success to the ‘rugby culture’ that cuts across countries and cultures and forms a common bond between rugby players and supporters. His first impression of the squad was that they are all good, keen young players, with good rugby skills and creativity. However he was surprised that there is not much of a ‘gym culture’ among the players in general and the low levels of strength. As a result he has been feeling that he has been playing catch up in the last few months with a focus on weight training and skill development. However the team has improved under his guidance and schedules and are now ready to focus on playing as a team from April.

And what does he predict for this season? “ We will do very well. Keeping in mind that we have a very young team who have the potential to be built into a great team”. At the end of the season he would be happy with having developed and coached a winning team!