Coming to the end of my touch rugby experience this year, I have had such a good opportunity to not only learn new things, but also work with new people from different grades, or even people in my grade then I haven’t had a chance to work with ever before.

I collaborated with lots of different people. not only people in my own team, but also people other teams as we sometimes trained together and worked together. Trying to work effectively with new people can sometimes be very difficult and frustrating, especially when they are people in different grades as you. I found this challenging but it never was too much for me to handle, in my team I had a couple of people who were in my grade and I was familiar with, although it wasn’t like we were close friends, but it was securing to have people that I still knew and we got to bond together due to that experience. We faced some challenges when working together, as some people were in different levels of skills and we easily got frustrated with each other if someone wasn’t preforming properly in the eyes of another team member. Although this did not happen to often, out coach would help us working together and make sure we weren’t wasting any time by talking or bickering in any way. As a team sport, collaboration is an incredibly important aspect as without the team we can’t play, and in order to play well a team relationship must be created so we can effectively communicate and collaborate during training and during games(LO5). I think in the end we all managed to work together as a team nicely, and I think everyone learnt more skills about how to work together well as a team with people you aren’t familiar with.

This school year, I joined pre-season touch rugby, I played touch rugby back in grade 8 which was a long time ago so I don’t consider knowing much about the sport as I have forgotten most of the skill I learnt 3 years ago. So learning the new skills has been very exciting and fun for me as I find the sport really enjoyable. Reflecting on the first season of pre-season, the things I found difficult the most was collaborating as it is a very important skill in the sport, which isn’t something I’m familiar with (swimming), so I have had to build on my collaboration skills. This involved putting myself more out there using communication which I’m also not used to doing in sports, during games and such. To do this I had to just try my hardest to be part of the team and to communicate as much as I could during practice games, which is something I still do need to work on as I’m a quiet person by nature but I am getting better on. In the future seasons, I can work on this by setting more goals for myself to be louder and more responsive during practice and games.

There are a lot of new skills I have developed whilst learning touch rugby, specific skills such as throwing and catching, as well as game tactics such as the ‘A-Drive’, and terms like ‘Dummy Half’. Along with lots of skills I still remember from grade 8 and am working on developing and improving. I can measure my improvement on skill such as throwing and catching, as well as my participation by reflecting on myself and getting feedback from my coach(LO2). For me, the physical skills like game tactics were a lot easier to develop and understand whilst I do still need to work on my collaboration and communication. All these skills are very important in touch rugby as they are used during games in order to work best as a team, whilst skills like collaboration and communication can overlap with other aspects of my life, which is feedback I have received a lot as these skills are not my strong suit and I believe that my collaboration in touch rugby as a team is helping me develop these skills further. I can use these skill in future activities for not only other sports but also other projects that involve group work, collaboration, and communication(LO5).