Armor Brings in Cavalry to Work With USA 7s Men as Perth Looms
Armor Brings in Cavalry to Work With USA 7s Men as Perth Looms
It has not been a great start to the SVNS season for the USA Men's 7s team.
They look ahead to the Perth Sevens ranked 11th out of 12 and thinking about how to get to the top right.
New Head Coach Simon Amor wasn't ignoring that fact. He came out of Dubai and Cape Town determined to make some significant changes. The big move was to put the players through something like a 7s boot camp.
Former Great Britain 7s captain Tom Mitchell, former New Zealand 7s captain Scott Curry, and the former S&C coaches from Great Britain and New Zealand were all brought in.
The message? This is the level of attention to detail you need. This is the commitment to accuracy you need. This is the level of fitness and physical preparedness you need.
"We have been working on rapidly improving firstly our fitness levels, as you cannot be successful in 7s if you are not at the required fitness level," Amor told GRR.
That was a message from Amor to the team and this is something that international 7s players have to learn periodically. These games are full-on for 14 minutes, and you cannot afford to take a moment off. To do that you need the fitness levels to be at a full sprint for almost the entire game.
In addition, game understanding is crucial for what is a relatively inexperienced group. Many of the USA players are good decision-makers, but are used to having a certain amount of time to make those decisions. On the SVNS World Series, there is much, much less time.
"Our game understanding and decision-making, which can take a lot longer to develop but as a team that is generally smaller than past USA sides, is critical for us to be successful," said Armor. "We are doing this through lots of scanning practices and small side games structured around a new set of offense and defense guiding principles and frameworks."
That leads into leadership and communication. Mitchell and Curry worked with the players on understanding each other and both shared their experiences about being captains and how that worked for them.
So it was a full-court press on those adjustments, but there is a bit of a speed bump. An illness as swept its way through the team and that hindered having all the players get through all the work. Some of the players will be too sick to go to Perth.
Even so, said Armor, "while I think we are still at the start of our journey as a group competing in an incredibly competitive World Series at the moment, the USA fans will see improved performances in Perth."
