Right after Cosimo's injury we searched on the Internet any news realted to rugby injuries and we realized that bad things happen and that lot of people is working all over the world to help the injury incidence decrease year after year. Following our dream of becoming an association that after helping Cosimo could become something that THROUGH Cosimo could help more people, we thought that the best start would have been working on prevention.

All over the world exists many different programs about rugby safety: RugbyReady is the one developed by the International Rugby Board and suggested to all the affiliated federations, while RugbySmart and SmartRugby are the national programs autonomously developed by new zealander and australian federation. Starting in 2008 also south african federation adopted its own safety program named BokSmart.

New Zealand Rugby Union turned its program compulsory in 2001 and since that moment the decrease of serious spinal injuries has been of 84%, while 56% has been the overall reduction of spinal injuries. The compulsory introduction of mouthguard in 1997 lead to a 43% reduction in rugby-related dental injury.

As soon as we learned all this things, we thought that a rugby safety workshop leaded by one of the southern emisphere expert would have been an excellent starting point and an inspiration source for the italian rugby panorama; we therefore contacted NZRU that answered through the manager of the RugbySmart program who suddenly gave us support and friendship...sending us an AllBlacks jersey signed by the players of the Test Match NZ-ITA to help us in fundraising!

Italian Rugby Federation showed the same enthusiastic welcome to our idea and took the burden of the organization of more workshops and of the travel expenses from New Zealand. At the end beside of our meeting in Cadimare (SP), organized with the help of the Italian Air Force, four more workshops have been held all over the country reaching more than 500 people.

Being driven by a dream we tried to keep alive our collaboration with Italian Rugby Federation that is showing keen to keep working on the safety side of rugby, introducing modifications in the formation system of coaches and referees, trying to build up a proper injury database and setting up a specific Safety Commission.

The collaboration with N.Z.R.U. continued in 2011 with four Richard Skelly's sessions that focused on 1 vs 1 situations with specific attention, mostly in Iolo and Genoa, to the tackling action, considered nowadays the most risky part of the game. If you want to see Mogliano's session, click here.

Our aim is to keep working to get to a real italian SicuRugby program to have Italy join the best country in the world, also because we are strongly convinced that a safer rugby is a more effective one, therefore a winning one!

At the end of the session in Genoa University the broadcasting company Liguria Sport shooted an interview with Richard, helping us to spread the news. You can watch it in the following video.

This is the first draft of a logo we designed for the program...let us know what you think about it!