Rugby is in the air and it seems as if everyone is talking about selection in the lead up to the Rugby World Cup. I promise you selection has been keeping national team coaches awake at night.

As I watched a warm up match last weekend with friends, we got into a lengthy discussion about the importance and difficulty of proper selection. I thought I might toss out a couple of thoughts and get your reactions.

Waisale Serevi is widely considered to be the greatest 7s player of all time. Playing for Fiji, Serevi helped launch and popularize the IRB Sevens World Series, and led Fiji to 7s World Cup titles in 1997 and 2005. Co-founder of Serevi Rugby in Seattle, Wash., The King has turned his attention to giving back to the game that has given him so much, leading camps and clinics, coaching programs and merchandise efforts. For more information seewww.serevirugby.com.

In my experience, there is only one way to select players for national team play. First, you must invest a considerable amount of time inventorying available talent. Ideally, you’d have everyone in one place for a certain amount of time, but it rarely works that way, so you have to travel and track impressions.

After you let your impressions marinate, you must formulate a game plan based on what you know to be available to you at that specific moment in time. Will your premium be on speed? Brute force? Deception?

Once you have a plan in hand, you select with an eye toward implementing the game plan you have established. What’s more, you select with one eye on the tournament at hand and the other on the future. You pick your ideal starting side and then supplement that with players on whom you are making calculated bets. With your team assembled, you then test the players for the fitness and the skill level required to execute your plan. If you like what you see, you’re ready to prepare. If not, you change things up and start over.

I say “you”, of course, referring to the team coach. I know many countries have selectors from the rugby union and I certainly do not dispute the value of multiple eyes and perspectives. In my opinion, however, the coach must be afforded the final say on team selection because it is on these decisions that he (or she) will be held accountable. Many countries now operate at the highest levels on this model. I will not hide from the fact that I once lost a coaching gig over this issue, nor will I shy from saying that I believe results after the fact would seem to validate my approach.

When I assemble teams for either XVs or 7s, I have a long, mental, position-by-position list of attributes (mental, physical and skills) I’m looking for. If there is sufficient interest, I could easily devote an entire column to this, so rich are the interdependencies within a team. For now, suffice to say it’s as much an art as a science.

Some of you will remember my July column, in which I discussed my favorite teams and their makeup. One of them was the 2005 Sevens World Cup championship team on which I was player/coach. I will never forget getting the call to act in that capacity while I was playing club rugby in France. I flew back home, met Wayne Pivac (the newly-minted XVs coach who was asked to help at the eleventh hour) at the airport and sat in his parked car discussing selections and making phone calls.

Time was short. We had only two weeks to prepare. Once selections were made public, the critics began to cackle. There was no way we would match the speed, pace and fitness of other national teams, they said. We were too old, they quipped. The results seemed to pour water on that fire. From the podium, I relished in one of my all-time favorite quotes from Neil Black – England’s famous #7 – when his 2003 XV’s World Cup team was called too old before proceeding through the ranks to defeat Australia for the championship: “We may be old, but we know the shortest way to the breakdown.”

For Fiji, the 2005 squad was the same thing. We were old, but our experience ultimately tipped the balance in our favor. Sitting in that car at the airport, we had taken a bet on experience, deciding that the best chance of winning was to structure a game plan around experience and select accordingly. We won that bet.

In the past few months, every national team coach has made similar bets. I would love to hear from you on which bets you think will pay off and which ones will fail. I’d love to hear your opinions on selection process. I’d love to hear what factors you’d weigh most if you were national coach of your favorite team. E-mail your thoughts and comments to  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . I will pick a couple of my favorites and tweet about them from my @waisale_serevi account.

In closing, a note about something that has been consuming my time in the past few weeks:  About this time next week, I will be headed to the airport to pick up New Zealand All Blacks Coach Gordon Tietjens, who has graciously agreed to help coach at my inaugural Serevi Rugby Academy for promising rugby athletes ages 18-24. I can’t wait to work with Gordon and with this special group of athletes, some of whom may eventually be selected for the U.S. National Team. Perhaps I will have some stories to report from the Academy in my September column.

God bless. Until next time…