Rugby Passing Drills

The best rugby passing drills climb from a standing pass off both hands, through a moving line and a two-touch catch-pass grid, up to a 2v1 and a conditioned touch game with width written into the scoring. Work the weak hand as hard as the strong one, check that the hands always travel back, and add a defender only once the shape holds.

Rugby union asks something of passing that few sports do. Your hands may never throw the ball forward, so an attack has to gain ground while the ball travels back through the line. Every pass gives up a little ground, because the receiver takes it behind the passer. A team that throws a slow, floated ball pays that toll three or four times on the way to the wing and arrives with nothing left. A team that passes flat and early arrives with a player free.

One session will show you where your squad gets stuck.

Most drill lists stop at the word "passing". That is too coarse to coach from, because two players who both look average at passing are usually failing at completely different things. Six separate skills sit underneath the word, two of which are not passes at all, and naming them turns "work on your passing" into something a player can actually go and do.

• Passing. The standard two-handed ball across the body, thrown flat and in front of a moving receiver. This is the one every other pass is measured against.
• Catching. Taking the ball cleanly, including the low one, the high one, and the ball that arrives behind the trailing shoulder. A knock-on gives the ball away as surely as a bad pass.
• Ball carrying. Running with the ball in both hands, so a defender never knows whether the pass is coming.
• Pop pass. A short vertical lift to a runner arriving late and flat, hands only, no arm swing.
• Spin pass. The spiral that carries fifteen metres and holds its line into wind. It is your way of skipping a defender to reach the wing.
• One-handed pass. The ball freed with a single arm, usually because the other one is occupied. It is the foundation of the offload.

That six-way split is not invented here. It is exactly how Striveon's rugby tools break down the Ball Handling area, and it is worth borrowing whatever you use to record it, a notebook included.

Which One Is Costing You Metres

Pick a fixture and count. Count the passes that arrive behind the receiver, the ones that arrive floated, and the ones a player takes standing still. You will usually find one sub-skill doing most of the damage. Coach that one for a fortnight before you touch the others.

Coaches lose reps to a misunderstanding here, so precision pays. One law covers both halves of a passing session, Law 11, the knock forward and the throw forward(opens in new tab). Its wording matters to how you coach.

Take the throw forward first. World Rugby's definitions(opens in new tab) say it happens when the arms of the passing player move forward, and that "forward" means towards the opposition's dead-ball line. The judgement sits on the arms. A ball that drifts forward through the air after leaving hands that travelled backwards has not broken the law.

That matters for what your drills reward. Tell a player to pass strictly sideways and they will slow down to make sure of it, which is exactly the habit that stalls an attack. Coach the hands travelling back across the body instead, and let the runner's own pace carry the ball. Speed and legality stop fighting each other.

The knock forward is the same law's other half, and it is why catching gets its own stage below rather than being folded into passing. Drop the ball forward and you hand over a scrum. Count the botched transfers in your next fixture and you will find a good share of them started with the hands that received the ball, not the hands that threw it.

Nothing holds up under pressure if it was never right standing still. These three drills fix the shape from a standing start, and they insist on both hands from the first rep. One-sided passers are a gift to a defence, because the whole line just shifts a shoulder and your attack has nowhere left to go. Tap the add button on any card that suits your squad, and the plan builds further down the page.

Where a Beginner Starts

A player brand new to rugby needs two things before anything else. Hands out early to meet the ball, and hips turned to face where it is going. Ten metres apart, twenty passes, both sides. That is a whole first session and it is not a wasted one. Keep the ball off the ground and the confidence follows.

A standing pass and a moving pass are different skills, and most squads live in the space between the two. Once players run, three new problems arrive at once. The line drifts sideways towards the touchline. Receivers flatten up and take the ball with no time. Support arrives level with the carrier and turns a two-man option into a one-man problem.

These three drills take each of those in turn. Cone the channel for all of them, because the drift only shows up when there is a line to cross. Striveon's rugby preset runs a Passing Series that builds the same way, standing pairs first and a four-player line on the move second, which is the sequence worth copying whether or not you record it anywhere.

Here is the drill block that fixes an attack that looks tidy right up until it goes wide. The ball moves hand to hand, nobody is dropping it, and it still arrives late on the wing. The cause is almost always a stride. Each player catches, takes one step while they decide, and passes. Four players in a line, four strides, and the defence has slid across.

Catch-pass means the ball leaves before that stride happens, which requires the decision to be made while the ball is still travelling. That is a habit of the eyes long before it is a habit of the hands. The three drills here train the eyes first and let the hands catch up. Constraints are what force that decision inside a live game, and the guide to designing small-sided games walks through setting them.

Passing does not stop when a defender arrives. Two of the six tracked sub-skills, the pop and the one-handed pass, exist specifically for the metre either side of contact, and the offload lives there too. World Rugby's Law 14.7a on the tackle(opens in new tab) requires a tackled player to make the ball available immediately by releasing, passing or pushing the ball in any direction except forward. Passing is one of those three legal options, and the only one that keeps an attack alive. The other two hand the ball to whoever arrives next, which is where our rugby rucking drills take over.

Keep this block honest about its scope. The drills below work the ball, the arms, and the timing, with pads held passive and touch rules doing the pressure. The technique of the collision itself, tackle height, head position, and how contact is introduced by age, is a separate session with separate safety rules. Our rugby tackling drills cover that side properly, and a squad should be sound there before offload work goes anywhere near full contact.

Width is where a passing session proves itself. An attack that never reaches the wing is not usually short of passers. It is short of players willing to hold their position on the touchline while the ball is somewhere else, and short of a carrier who commits a defender before releasing. You can start on both this week. Holding width when the ball is on the far side takes a season to become a habit.

The three drills here take the ball from a 2v1 up to a full conditioned game. Run them in that order. A squad that cannot fix one defender in a 2v1 will not suddenly manage it with fourteen players on the pitch, and the touch game will just look like a fitness session with a ball.

Seventy-five minutes covers all five stages with enough reps in each to matter. The order is doing real work here, because hands have to be warm before anyone throws a spin pass and the width block only makes sense once the catch-pass beat is there. Ten of the fifteen drills fit in one night, and the block times match the times on the cards, so nothing needs trimming on the touchline. Swap any block for the one your squad most needs.

Everything you ticked across the five stages totals up here. Print it, copy it into a sheet, or pass it along to whoever runs your warm-up while you set the cones.

Coach two or three sides and the passing drills stop fitting in your head. Striveon's drill library keeps your rugby passing work together, filed by the pass each drill builds and the stage it sits in, so your assistant runs the same 2v1 you do and you can save a softer version for the U12s. Plug the block into structured training sessions and the season plan, what you run on Thursday, and how far a player has come all sit together.

"Is this player ready for the next drill" is the question a drill list never answers, and answering it decides whether your session helps anyone. Move a player up too early and the technique you spent a fortnight building comes undone in front of the squad. Leave them too long and they switch off.

Striveon's rugby tools track eight skill areas: Contact Skills, Ball Handling, Kicking Skills, Set Pieces, Attacking Skills, Defensive Skills, Tactical Understanding, and Physical Attributes. Every skill inside them is scored on one ten-level scale, and those level descriptions turn out to be a good honest ruler for passing whether you record them in an app or in a notebook.

The preset that seeds those areas is a starting scaffold and nothing more. Tailor the areas to the coaching plan you already run, because a club that lives and dies on its set piece needs a different shape from a seven-a-side programme.

Both Hands, On the Move, Catch-Pass, Contact Edge and Width are browse stages, split for a reader working down a page, so they were never going to sit one to one against the eight areas. All five live inside Ball Handling, with the pop and offload work reaching into Contact Skills and the width work into Attacking Skills.

Almost every club squad you will coach sits somewhere between levels 3 and 7, so those are the steps worth planning around. Print the table below and keep it with you on the touchline.

Rating the same skill twice, a month apart, is what makes the ladder useful. Two numbers side by side are the difference between believing a wing has improved and knowing it. Watch a player's handling develop in Striveon as those repeat ratings stack into a chart, and the weak-side count you wrote on a sheet back in the first session becomes a number the player can watch move.