Geraint John
Welshman Geraint John on Monday quit as coach of Australia’s Sevens team to take up a new role for the Welsh Rugby Union.
The sudden announcement comes barely a year out from the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
John, who had served as the Sevens director and head coach since June 2014, resigned to take up a new position with the WRU as the leader of the elite coach development.
“While obviously we are sad to lose Geraint, we respect his decision entirely,” ARU general manager Ben Whitaker said.
“We do, however, have the right structure in place to ensure this won’t negatively impact either the men’s or women’s players or the programme in general.”
John’s position with Wales is a new role created by the WRU to develop coaches within the country in the effort to make them capable of coaching Welsh national teams and Welsh regions.
“I’m thrilled to have been chosen to take on this exciting new role,” said John.
“Having spent ten years away from Wales, I feel I have a huge amount to give back to Welsh rugby, developing the next generation of elite coaches for Wales.
“The ultimate goal of this role is to develop our top, up-and-coming coaches so that we have Welsh coaches who can coach Wales.
I’ll be looking at our national age grade and pathway coaches, and working with coaches within the Regions and the Premiership, to see how we can help and support them,” explained John.
Australia Women’s Sevens coach Tim Walsh will take over John’s role as the Men’s coach in an interim capacity, with a search under way for a permanent replacement.
Under John, Australia won a bronze medal at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and finished 5th in Sevens World Series that concluded in May.
The men’s team will in November play in a regional qualifying tournament for next year’s Olympics after just missing out on the automatic places awarded to the top four in the World Series.
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