New RUPA president Damien Fitzpatrick to prioritise NRC
The Australian
February 17, 2018
Wayne Smith
Senior sport writer
New Rugby Union Players Association president, Waratahs hooker Damien Fitzpatrick, intends to make it a priority of his term to improve the professionalism of the National Rugby Championship.
Australia might be bleeding high-profile players to Europe and Japan (Waratahs winger Taqele Naiyaravoro is the latest to commit to the northern hemisphere) but two levels below that,
foreign clubs are grabbing talented players as they emerge from the NRC.
Only by shoring up that competition, Fitzpatrick believes, can Australia hope to stabilise its playing base.
“Money (for players) might not be the answer to this,” Fitzpatrick told The Weekend Australian yesterday following the formal announcement that he had become RUPA’s ninth president.
“But I’m sure with
a little more investment from Rugby Australia, which does not necessarily have to go into pure salaries, we can give each team a bit more funding.
“I feel there’s room for growth in the quality of the NRC. There are some teams that run good programs but there are others that are largely left to their own devices.
“What kind of program are players coming into?
“We need to make it more like Super Rugby and take it further away from club rugby. At the moment we’re dead smack in the middle.”
He should know. For the past two years he has played for and captained the Sydney Rays in the NRC.
Although
RUPA still has five teams as its official Super Rugby policy aim and is adamant a way needs to be found to reinstate the Force when the next broadcast deal is negotiated to come into effect in 2021,
Fitzpatrick believes that even in Western Australia the feeling for the moment is to “let the dust settle” before resuming that battle.
While the hot button issues of today might not rate alongside the demise of a Super Rugby club, that’s not to say they are not of vital interest to the players.
The hodgepodge arrangements of when Super Rugby clubs allocate leave time to their players has come to an end after a uniform arrangement was negotiated under the CBA: one week immediately after the Super Rugby final, three weeks after the NRC final along with a train-yourself period over Christmas and New Year.
That might sound trivial but not to players who are needed to help on their parents’ farm, for example.
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