Hong Kong rugby shelves ‘stubborn’ recruitment policy with Exiles programme – and its already paying dividends
- Previous self-defeating approach to recruitment and retention allowed some of best and brightest prospects to be lost to rivals
- “We realised we need to stop being so stubborn,’ says academy chief Tomos Howells, with union now open to players plying their trade overseas
When Sam Walsh runs out at the Cathay Pacific/HSBC Hong Kong Sevens next week he will be fulfilling boyhood dreams, and posing serious questions for the city’s rugby bosses at the same time.
The former King George V pupil, was born, raised and educated in Hong Kong, but it will be the United States he represents next week.
Like Lucas Lacamp, who played for Hong Kong at the Under-20 World Cup in 2019 but has also now represented the US at senior level, Walsh went to university in North America, and was allowed to drift away from the place where they learned to play the game as a result.
The pair are just two of the many men and women who have slipped through the cracks because of a largely self-defeating approach to recruitment and retention, that allowed some of the best and brightest to be lost to rivals.
Previously, the Hong Kong Rugby Union insisted players were based in the city as part of the selection criteria – an approach that in the past has proved detrimental to the development of the national team in both sevens and 15s.
“We’ve come the realisation that we need to stop being so stubborn as a union and use the players that we have, because there are a lot players we have lost as well,” Tomos Howells, who runs the union’s academy programme, said.