Cornish Pirates

Adrian Edwards Reports On The Season In The Community

Having had a pretty successful season on the field with the EDF Trophy win and some extremely creditable wins in the league and off the field, we have been increasing our work within the community in various ways.

Adrian Edwards & Villi Ma'asi Boarding The Coach To The Twickenham Finals

The Cornish Pirates joined forces with Premier Rugby and EDF Energy to support their tag rugby coaching for years 5 & 6 in junior schools, which is a five week session finishing with a tag rugby festival between the participating schools.

As some will be aware, the winners for the first festival, St Mary's C of E won their event and played at Twickenham on the EDF Cup Finals Day.

St Mary's School At Twickenham

The Pirates will have coached 16 individual schools by the end of the summer term and we will coach 24 further schools from September onwards.

The senior schools in the county are not being left out and during the season we attended a couple of schools on a Monday after a home game to do our match reviews and invite pupils into the sessions to observe the coaches and players and to ask questions on their rugby and training regimes.

This was a fantastic opportunity for both the club and schools alike and we would like to keep this going next season and visit as many schools as is practical. A great advantage is that as a squad we can travel around Cornwall and see areas that some players and staff would not normally get to see!

Coach Jim McKay At The Teacher's Desk - Mullion School

As well as coaching, the players have attended a number of events such as presenting awards at school festivals, healthy living awards to qualifying schools and various charity events.

A memorable evening was the charity fashion show at St Johns Hall, where a number of our players donned their playing kit and strutted their stuff on the catwalk.

The Cornish Pirates Learning Zone, which does invaluable work with children in Penwith is another area in which we try and assist by helping Center Manager, Kevin Jackson with some of the work and sport sessions he organises at the centre.

As well as helping with coaching, the players also encourage children with their reading and do interviews with the kids.

Player & Reading Champion 'Nick Makin' At The Learning Zone

Our work in the community is very important to the club as it is a great learning aid for the players to interact with different people and age groups but also to pass on some of their knowledge they have picked up over the years with regards to rugby skills and health and fitness.

We will continue to work as hard as we can in community schemes, we aim to meet all the requests that we receive and to deliver as much next season as we did in 2006/07.

Adrian Edwards