Alain Hyardet, the former USAP coach (1996-1999 then 2014-2015) created an endowment fund, which aims to educate young rugby players beyond the oval ball. This first experience in the genre led him to Orange (Vaucluse).
Alain Hyardet, what is your project of educating children through rugby?
Everywhere I went, I was interested in the educational world, how our children were going to evolve, grow up. When I returned from my American experience in Major League Rugby (Austin, 2017), I moved to Montpellier and I thought about a project that would revolve around the education of the children of a rugby club. The Rugby Club Orangeois was sensitive to my approach and we created with Julien Tomas
, an endowment fund, Tchic-Tchac, to help us in our approach. Since September 2021, we have started the project in Orange.
Where did this thought come from?
Teenagers work on intergenerational issues by visiting seniors in nursing homes.
DR – DR
What is this project about?
It favors living together. Rugby is just a pretext. We try to build our children by associating their rugby activities with complementarities according to age groups. We educate to sport through sport as we educate to culture through culture. We were inspired by judo, where each belt indicates a degree of skill, of technicality. We imagined colored socks: green, red, yellow, blue. They are associated with the understanding and application of the rules set by the club: politeness, rules of common life, modesty, cleanliness. You don’t yell at a kid who hasn’t assimilated this or that criterion. The color of his socks, given to the kid by his educator, indicates his level of assimilation of the rules.
Read also :
Education: when sport becomes the school of life
And concretely, what are the complementarities that you offer to children?
They differ according to age. For the youngest, the U6, we must help them develop their body expression. Circus workshops improve their motor skills, essential in our rugby. The U8s are introduced to theatre, which allows them to express themselves better, especially in front of others. For the U10s, we agreed that music could help them better control their emotions. The U12s lead a real social and environmental project, based on diversity. The under 14s work on the theme of intergenerational. They attend EHPADs where they lead sports sessions for the elderly. Some have created ties and return to the EHPAD with their parents. Elderly people even go to the stadium to support the kids! Finally, the U16s are made aware of disability. They share the practice of sport with disabled people. This changes the look that we can have. And we realize that in the exchange, the most disabled is not necessarily the one with the disability… Once a week, throughout the season, our young people from Orange attend these workshops.
Can you draw up an initial assessment of your action?
Julien Tomas is the former international scrum half of Montpellier.
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