The Cayman national men’s sevens side begins their preparations for the Central American and Caribbean Sports Organization Games at the end of the year with a trip to the Las Vegas Invitational Elite 7s competition in a couple of weeks.
The tournament runs in Sin City from Jan. 23-25 and also includes national teams USA Falcons, Canada Maple Leafs, Trinidad and Tobago, Peru, Belgium and Chile.
This competition is a step up from the recent North America Caribbean Rugby Association sevens held in Cayman in November where the men’s team were disappointed with their performances.
Richard “Grizz” Adams is Cayman’s CEO and technical director of rugby. He admits Cayman had high hopes of winning the NACRA regional championships and qualifying for the 2014 Commonwealth Games but fell short.
“Once again, we did not perform well on day one and the loss to Trinidad ended our Commonwealth Games ambitions,” Adams said.
“What made it worse was the fact that we led that game and then just made way to many unforced errors for players of this caliber. We were all disappointed with the result as we knew we were much better than the performances we displayed on day one.”
On day two, Cayman did well in the Plate competition but in reality when a team is out of the championship games, then there is not much interest.
“I have reviewed the game tapes literally hundreds of times now as well as reviewing our training and training game performances,” Adams said. “We have isolated three areas where we need to really step up our game and 2014 will be used to develop these areas as well maintain our other phases of play.
“Las Vegas is a fantastic tournament as you can see from the quality of teams that compete.”
He added that they have huge ambitions for a small island nation with a tiny playing population and are working hard through a structured strategic development plan that deals with rugby sevens players’ development from early age through international senior players.
Adams is grateful for support from Maples with the sevens academy and more recently from sponsors of the national high performance program.
He has picked certain tournaments as development ones for the national team. After Las Vegas it will be the Cape Fear Invitational in June, then the Serevi Invitational in July, New York Sevens in September and CACSO and NACRA Sevens in November.
In addition, there are plans for the Cayman players currently at university in the U.K. to form a Cayman team there that will play in 14 tournaments this summer, organized with sponsorships and promised support.
Cayman squad for Las Vegas:
Richard Lewis, Edward Westin, Chris Palmer, Adam Keenan, Justin Wight, Venasio Tokatokavanua, Marco Du Plessis, Paul Westin, Jonathan Murphy, Chris Kennedy, Alex Pineau and one other yet to be confirmed after injury tests.
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