Mixed Ability rugby
Volunteer coordinator.
Overview
I help facilitate Mixed Ability Rugby, supporting an inclusive rugby environment where players of different abilities, experiences, and backgrounds can take part in the game together.
Mixed Ability Rugby is built on a simple but powerful idea: rugby should be accessible, social, competitive, and enjoyable without excluding people because of disability, confidence, experience, age, or perceived ability.
My role is to help make that environment work. That means supporting sessions, encouraging participation, helping players feel welcome, and contributing to a culture where everyone is treated as part of the team.
What I Do
- Inclusive Participation — helping create an environment where players of different abilities can take part together with confidence.
- Session Support — assisting with the practical running of activities, games, and rugby sessions where needed.
- Player Encouragement — supporting players to get involved, try new things, and build confidence through rugby.
- Team Culture — helping reinforce respect, patience, humour, and belonging across the group.
- Practical Facilitation — supporting coaches, volunteers, and players so that sessions run smoothly and safely.
- Community Connection — helping Mixed Ability Rugby feel like a genuine part of the wider club, not something separate or peripheral.
- Positive Rugby Values — promoting teamwork, respect, enjoyment, effort, and inclusion through the game.
Why It Matters
Mixed Ability Rugby matters because it challenges a narrow idea of who sport is for.
Too often, people are excluded from sport because they do not fit a traditional model of performance, confidence, physical ability, or experience. Mixed Ability Rugby turns that idea on its head. It shows that rugby can be competitive and inclusive at the same time.
The value is not just in playing the game. It is in belonging to a team, wearing the shirt, taking part in club life, building friendships, and being recognised as a rugby player rather than as a category or exception.
Facilitating that environment is important because inclusion does not happen by accident. It needs structure, patience, encouragement, and people willing to make space for others.
Skills Developed
- Inclusive leadership by helping people participate with dignity and confidence
- Empathy and awareness across different needs, personalities, and levels of experience
- Communication with players, coaches, volunteers, families, and club members
- Adaptability when sessions need to respond to different abilities or confidence levels
- Team building across players who may have very different rugby backgrounds
- Community engagement by helping connect Mixed Ability Rugby with the wider club
- Practical problem solving in live, people-centred situations
- Patience and encouragement when supporting players to develop at their own pace
Personal Reflection
Helping facilitate Mixed Ability Rugby has reinforced one of the best things about community sport: people do not need to be elite athletes to get real value from being part of a team.
For some players, the biggest achievement might be making a tackle, scoring a try, learning a new skill, or simply turning up and joining in. For others, it is about friendship, routine, confidence, and feeling accepted within a club environment.
That is what makes Mixed Ability Rugby important. It is rugby with the doors opened wider.
It still has the things that make rugby brilliant: teamwork, effort, physicality, humour, respect, and the occasional moment where everyone has a different memory of what happened at the ruck. But it also makes space for people who may otherwise have been left outside the game.
For me, helping facilitate Mixed Ability Rugby is about supporting inclusion in a practical way. Not as a slogan, but as something that happens on the pitch, in the clubhouse, and across the wider rugby community.