The Brunei Rugby Football Union are aiming to introduce rugby to 2,000 students between the ages of six to 12 this year.
They hope to achieve their goal through the International Rugby Board (IRB) 'Get Into Rugby' program by introducing it to 1,000 students in the first half of the year and another 1,000 in the six months following that.
The development program that is being used across the world aims to grow the game of rugby and introduce the values of integrity, respect, solidarity, passion and discipline.
The program follows three simple steps, starting off with 'Try', which introduces the game to the children so that they learn and experience the passion, principles, skills and values of rugby.
'Play' is the second phase, allowing the students to play (touch rugby) in safe environments through day events, leagues and programs after they receive their initial training.
This will help develop their skills, build their understanding of the game and experience the ethos of rugby.
The final route of their journey is 'Stay', which is to support the students' progress and to stay in the game either as a player, fan or volunteer.
BRFU director of international relations Ainol Razman Mohd Ghazaly also hopes to also use the program as an educational tool to further the children's development in English, math as well as their social development.
"We don't want people to see rugby as just a game because it's more than that, it's education," said Ainol in an interview with The Brunei Times.
"Practical math is involved during the game, with one of many examples being when you need to move back 10 meters on defence in a line-out and mental math when having to tally up the scores.
"It's not like football when one goal is a goal, in rugby you can score either five, three or two points.
"The idea is that we will be looking at roughly 16 schools who want to be involved and we are hoping that there will be sponsors for each of these schools to help promote this 'Get Into Rugby' programme," said Ainol.
BRFU will be using a key performance indicator for each child as a way to see their academic, social and co-curricular development.
They will get the baseline data at the end of each term and will then see how they can use rugby to increase their academic, social and co-curricular development further.
"What we want to do with the programme is to see if we can help improve performance in schools through the students getting involved in rugby," said the Malaysian.
"Once we start developing, hopefully each year we can introduce it to another 2000 and then eventually add more numbers," added Ainol.
The BRFU are also looking at bringing in IRB educators to teach the school teachers how to teach their students the game of rugby.
The BRFU are in talks with the Co-curricular Department of the Ministry of Education about the program.
Ainol first talked about the 'Get Into Rugby' programme last November when The Brunei Times broke the news that the International Rugby Board (IRB) Council granted BRFU associate member status.
"It will now take another year or two for IRB to recognise us as a full member. After that we will be able to get a development grant for us to move on to do better things," said Ainol then.
He also said the union has spoken with the Ministry of Education and "hopefully we can have the Brunei Rugby Schools Union set up early next year (2014)."
