Here at OURFC, we like to keep you up to date with progress of our recent alumni, both on and off the field. With recent playing successes for the likes of Sam Egerton (England 7’s) and Gus Jones (London Welsh), it seems time to balance out with an exciting project being undertaken off the field.
The project, born out of numerous coffees on the Cowley road, from the Truck Store to the Quarter Horse, sees a long distance Anglo-French collaboration between Nice and Oxford. Guillaume Bourda (graduate of the Said Business School, Greyhounds stalwart and personal sommelier to Tim Stevens) along with Sean Morris (ever present at OURFC in one guise or another since 2008) have recently launched RugbyCentric.com, a rugby strength and conditioning (S & C) platform currently in development.
The project
Rugbycentric is a free online rugby training platform dedicated to facilitating the development of rugby players of all ages and all levels. The platform allows users to design sessions, plan their training schedule, test their progress and interact with an online community. The application uses a gamification design to increase user engagement and make using the platform more fun and interactive. On RugbyCentric.com, users can create and share workouts, learn about the fundamentals of all the elements of training successfully, plan training schedules and track their progress as they improve with fitness tests, points, levels and badges, and an avatar that continually evolves relative to specific gains made by the user. For the most committed players, rugbycentric also offers bespoke in-season and pre-season online S & C ‘camps’ where players get all the guidance and programming of an elite rugby set up. The system has been coded by Guillaume, who will tirelessly develop the platform, improving functionality and pushing the project forward. We offer some mobile portability today and we hope to develop a mobile application in the near future.
A complementary platform for coaches
We are also developing http://coach.rugbycentric.com, a web application dedicated to rugby coaches and enabling – among other things – video analysis of matches and the generation of team and individual match statistics. We hope to offer this as a complementary platform where coaches will be able to generate remotely manage their team with scheduling, workouts, training sessions, events, pre-match tactics, post-match feedback and match stats and ultimately communicate with, and keep a track of, each member of their squad on rugbycentric.
Get Involved!
Does your club want S & C input but can’t afford to pay a coach? Or do individuals at your club/friends/family want to take their S & C more seriously? Are you coaching and want to help us develop our coaching platform?
We would love to get you on board and will offer OURFC alumni our premium products with very good discounts/complimentary access. Please get in touch: rugbycentric@gmail.com
Help Needed
The application is constantly evolving and feedback on which features are good/bad or missing is key for our project. Rugbycentric is free and all OURFC players and alumni are welcomed to register and feedback.
Are you a software developer, a designer, a social media or marketing guru or you just have lots of energy and ideas? Do you have expertise in securing funding for start-ups? Or can you offer us advice on how to get a start-up off the ground? We are a small self-funded team and anyone with an OURFC connection willing to help or get involved in the project would be warmly welcomed! Drop us an email: rugbycentric@gmail.com