02/09/2026
A photograph from another era, but one that tells quite a story.
In the early 1990s I was fortunate enough to become a young sports lecturer and coach. I was working with the Youth Service, running a small facility in Upton, before moving into coaching and lecturing at what was then Worcester College of Technology.
Around that time I had experienced basketball camps and could immediately see that the same principles could work on a rugby field. Rugby camps as we recognise them today simply were not commonplace. Rugby development was still largely centred around clubs and, in many cases, the independent school system.
I had enjoyed my own opportunities around Malvern and Worcester as a youngster, so I wanted to create something that opened those opportunities up to others.
In 1993 I ran my first rugby camp.
That became the blueprint for much of what followed.
Over the years I worked as a Sports Development Officer, lecturer and coach for councils and governing bodies, while also developing my own basketball camps and sports projects.
Then this photograph appeared again, tucked away in a book from around 1995 or 1996.
Looking at it now makes me smile. A young coach running his own events, sponsored by Spalding, with the basketball displays, equipment and kit surrounding what was effectively my little travelling sports operation.
It felt pretty special at the time.
My education as a coach had already started years earlier through the Birmingham Bullets environment, coaching clinics in the late 1980s, scholarship programmes in the early 1990s and then delivering roadshows and basketball development projects.
That journey would eventually include work connected with the NBA, Mad Skills programmes, Sunny Delight projects, Adidas initiatives and, running alongside all of it, rugby.
Different sports. Different organisations. Different generations.
But the principle never really changed.
Create an environment. Give young people an opportunity. Make sport exciting. Make them want to come back.
More than thirty years later, that is still probably the biggest lesson I took from those days.
What a period of life. What an education. And what a privilege it was to be doing it so young.
