Evasion is a fundamental movement skill. Players use in pretty much all their activities, without necessarily focusing on the specific skills they need.
Without becoming too bogged down in the technical requirements, you want to improve your players starting and stopping, balance, change of direction and acceleration. With that comes an awareness of space, time, teammates, the opposition and the ball.
There are three approaches you can take: Work on general movement skills, develop a specific movement skill (like a side-step or spin) or pose problems for the players to discover their own movement solutions.
Underpinning this, you need to understand your own players’ capabilities and limitations.
Here are some warm-up exercises where you can place a little more emphasis on how the players respond to movement cues and clues. Nearly of all of them include a ball.
Go-forward evasion goes to one of the main rugby principles of why we want better footwork – to go forward towards the opposition try line. This exercise builds up to game-like scenarios, so you can just use the first activity for your warm-up if you want.
Evasion is means you need to evade something. Step to the edge creates a visual clue of what to avoid. Players have to adjust to what’s in front of them, while still going forward.
If you want something a bit more chaotic, an old favourite of mine is Reaction squares. This has the players stopping, starting, changing angles, bending down and looking for space.
Ball carriers have a better chance of beating tacklers if they are going forward and changing their angles. Encourage players to do this, even if they are facing two or more defenders. MORE
The receiver often takes a pass just before being tackled. If he can get to the edge of the defender, he might break through or offload the ball in contact. Work on that valuable skill with this session. MORE
Use “reaction squares” to get players moving into space with the ball in their hands. This is a fun activity and elements can be part of the warm-up to other sessions. MORE
Look at this great and more advanced version of a game we call Nevada Smith. Plus, have a look at Evasion Triangles as well, which could be a progression from this exercise. MORE
Mauling is a powerful weapon and you don’t have to be a big side to use it. A great tactic is to set up a maul from the back of a ruck to create go-forward and tie in their defenders. MORE
I’ve been talking tackling to plenty of coaches in the last few weeks. That’s not unusual. Therefore, I wanted to share with you one of my favourite tackling “drills”: High pressure tackling reactions. I say drill because it’s a 1 v 1 exercise. MORE
The ball carrier uses a strong fend to create space and time to pass the ball to their supporting player while the defender aims to disrupt. They then turn the corner and repeat MORE