top rugby books for coaches

Top Rugby Books For Coaches

Rugby coaches at all levels, from amateur to professional, can benefit from reading books on the sport. These books can provide valuable insights into the strategies, tactics, and mentalities that successful coaches use to lead their teams to victory. In this article, we will highlight the top books for rugby coaches, covering a wide range of topics, including coaching philosophy, player development, and game analysis. Whether you’re a first-time coach or a seasoned veteran, these books are sure to help you improve your coaching skills and lead your team to success.

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Break the Line: Analysis & Method in Attacking Rugby

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Rick Ferrara joins Phil Sharpe, Head Coach of Holt RFC in London’s Eastern Division, for the Second Edition of the popular Break the Line tactics manual, featuring rich commentary on each tactic, a new drills section, and QR code links to videos that show each tactic in action.

Break the Line is a primer for coaches and players who want to understand the concepts behind attacking in rugby at a developmental level and beyond. It examines how, from very basic ideas, a player or coach can develop more complex attacks in the open field. The diagrams are designed specifically for this book. They are clear, intuitive, and meant to convey the speed and angles at which attackers and their support should move in order to win in tactical situations.

By being so ultra-focused, Break the Line is an excellent guide, particularly for those who wish to gain an advantage in understanding what makes for sharp, efficient, and winning offense. Inside you’ll find simple and complex open-field tactics, analysis, tricks to winning situations, “spoilers” that ruin offensive attacks, drills for honing certain skills, and tips for real-world application of the techniques.

Click here to buy from Amazon UK


Coaching Rugby: Including More Than 100 Drills and Games for Coaching All the Basics

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Anxious about coaching rugby to children? Maybe you’re already coaching, but sometimes struggle to get your points across to your players? Perhaps you find yourself frequently running out of preparation time or think your sessions are becoming dull? Coaching Rugby is Dan Cottrell’s best-selling manual created for new and aspiring coaches of junior players. It is designed to help you build your players’ techniques, skills and understanding of the whole game from ages 8 to 16, to give them the best start possible to their rugby playing career. Divided into two parts, part one focuses on the basics of working with young players in a safe and rewarding environment. Part two contains more than 100 training sessions, games and developments to coach and enhance all the basic skills of rugby union.

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Rugby Drills: 125 Activities to Improve Your Coaching Sessions

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Crowood’s Rugby Drills is a collection of 125 activities, practices and games designed to improve coaching sessions at all levels of the game. The drills are organised into chapters according to a particular skill or phase of the game; from the warm up to handling, contact, lineout, scrum, kicking and defence. Each chapter starts with a series of simple activities before progressing through to more complex ones, each broken down into step-by-step explanations and diagrams, as well as guidance on how to increase the level of difficulty.

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Rugby Skills, Tactics and Rules

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Now in its fifth edition, Rugby Skills, Tactics and Rules has earned a reputation as the best book for learning the fundamental skills of rugby union. It provides an attractive, easy-to-read and straightforward discussion of the key components of the game, from player positions and tactics to different kinds of set plays, passes and moves. This great-looking book cuts through the jargon and tells coaches and players what they really need to know.

Click here to buy from Amazon UK

If you have some top rugby books for coaches that you suggest, please let us know in the comments below and we can add to our list!

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