Rugby Toolbox — skills & drills, fitness and training plans
When NZ Rugby approached us about re-inventing their existing Rugby Toolbox website, our immediate thought was, it must be tablet first. We’ll get it right for tablet display, then the other screen sizes will follow.
More than meets the eye
As resources go there are 100’s of them, but they’re just the tip of the iceburg as far as complexity goes. The solution needed to be content managed and support annual membership subscriptions, either paid for with an online transaction or by entering a unique voucher code (codes to be generated in batches by the site administrator).
So the site has a paywall, certain content is accessible publicly, while other sections are for members only.
Members can browse and shortlist skills and drills appropriate to the age group of their team or player position. Skills and drills themselves can be made up of a variety of digital media.
When you ask someone to build a website that contains over 400 video segments, an individualised fitness planner, a payment functionality and a library full of pictures and articles – you don’t want complications – Satellite Media made sure this voyage was hassle free!
Fitness planner
One of the great free resources is the Fitness Planner. Coaches can enter their players individually to automatically create unique training programmes for them using the Fitness Planner (or Players can do it themselves). Coaches can generate training plans based on the players age, position, level of conditioning, time of season (pre-season, during, off-season) and number of years of preparation they’ve had.
RugbySmart
The Rugby Toolbox is also a portal for a wealth of information about health and safety in Rugby. Partnering with ACC, NZ Rugby asked us to create RugbySmart, a stand-alone portal within the RTB to house articles ranging from safety on the field to respect to diet and nutrician.
