Without wanting to turn this into a contest, i have also coached a long time and currently coach my sons team 'some lads dad' as you say. But all the things you mention as being able to develop playing touch/tag, i focus on, and have seen huge improvement on, while playing tackle.

Support play, playing tackle, has come on leaps and bounds and its two fold, the ball carrier taking the contact develops the ability to off load the ball through contact, the support runners are developing, not only to support, but to time the support. I dont think the kids i coach would be anywhere near as developed at support play if they had played touch the last 3 year, where in essance, there is no ability/option to offlload.

But its good discussion Seth, i respect your views on the development side of the game, i guess it boils down to what people see working for them, and the aims of coach, i want my kids to reach whatever potential they have, i believe playing tackle gives them the best chance of doing this.....But as you rightly say, plenty of junior coaches just want to win.

I think that's the point Matt and you've obviously got the right ethos, unfortunately the majority haven't and I think the development of players across the board would be enhanced by focusing away from contact for a bit longer.

I guess that is the point we sort of Disagree on, the quality of the coaching matters, regardless of the rules...

I took my son to a union team for a few month in our offseason, they play touch/tag and had done for 2/3 year at that point, depending if they started at 6 or 7 year old, and they displayed none of the characteristics you mention as natural development advantages of playing touch/tag, they ran around like it was a game of bulldog, with running backwards the only space they seemed interested in taking, it was an absolute mess, with no intervention from the coach... hence the short stay

I guess what im trying to say is, a good coach, with the right principals, has more scope to develop a kid further playing tackle, than that same coach would if they played touch, again, thats just my opinion from my experience.

PS: Not saying im a good coach, just my principals are right lol

You sound like you are Matt,love this conversation and could chat for hours on the balances of both approaches. As you say, it's not black and white.

I really don’t think the kind of impact younger kids receive is a significant risk of brain injury; it’s more prevalent when the bodies mature a bit and things ramp up.

I’d rather kids were brought up learning how to tackle and take tackle so that they can handle it when the physicality come in.

I’m with Tad on this one - the quality of the coaching may be a bigger issue and we don’t want a vastly different junior game to senior.

I.e. is it not possible to teach and develop skill and evasion at the same time as contact? personally I’d try harder to evade if some big angry kid is running towards me about to tackle me…

All junior sports formats need to be modified for development purposes. Tackling at the youngest end is more akin to scragging eachother to the floor anyway, handing skills at the earliest introduction to the game are hindered by tackle in my opinion.

How does junior coaching improve then? This does seem to be pretty critical if we’re not only going to develop players, but a good coach is part of the attraction and retention of juniors in the first place?

Better coach ed though seeing what the rhinos do in schools I hope their support of clubs is better. Coach ed for me needs firstly to instill simple yet criminally overlooked principles ie maximize all players active participation in sessions ie 1 ball each or 1 between 2 where appropriate, swap drills that include lots of queuing for more active ones. Players should be active for at least 80% of the session but queues are commonplace.

Unfortunately you're always going to be limited because the majority are low skilled volunteers, so you have to create the right environment for development sometimes regardless of coaching ie modifying the game and only introducing competitiveness ect at the right stage and level.

Is he going to the club he loves? Rl players are a special breed especially home grown.

I guess ultimately we need more coaches at the level. I’m really hoping a few in the rhinos academy make the grade into first team - some decent prospects.