Calven Bland – Singapore Rugby, Development and Grassroots – “The Big Thing We Need To Do Is We Need To Create A Fun Environment For The Kids”

rugbyasia247 Posted On May 13, 2025

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Calven Bland - Singapore Rugby, Development and Grassroots

We sat down with Calven ‘Beige’ Bland, who is of Fijian and NZ heritage, and has been based in Singapore for more than 20 years. Calven has been heavily involved in rugby development in the Southeast Asian country, having played and been President of local club Wanderers RFC, setting up the Titans RFC (and Ruck and Rumble) and being part of the Singapore Rugby Union over the years.

We get stuck into a bit of everything from social rugby, youth player development, ensuring kids have fun at rugby and the potential in Singapore.

Calven’s tale of an expat arrival in Asia and joining a rugby club to find an instant group of friends is one that’s been repeated with minor variations numerous times by different individuals. However, his two decades of involvement in rugby in Singapore spanned all levels from playing, setting up a youth club, to being part of the group that brought the HSBC SVNS to the nation.

“Everyone knows me as ‘beige’, not black, not white, something in between, and I am a Kiwi Fijian from New Zealand, and have been in Singapore for 20 years. I ended up in Singapore in 2005 on a one-year project, and am still here and married with children, and a mortgage.”

His background includes spending time in the armed forces, studying as an engineer and working throughout the Pacific, and he has been away from New Zealand for nearly three decades.

He started playing, as so many young kids do in New Zealand, at a young age and in his case, in rural NZ. “My dad worked for one of the banks in the rural sector, so every three or four years, we’d move branches. I’ve played all my rugby in country New Zealand, and this was back in the days when it was the middle of winter, barefoot, and no one had boots, and the balls were hard leather, so as a result, no one kicked the ball!

My earliest experience is just running around as a five-year-old with other five-year-olds and just loving it, loving the mud, loving the rain, loving the fact that I’m doing this stuff outdoors with my friends from school.

It just sort of snowballed from there. Every school had rugby teams, and you played for your rugby team, and you start off in the second 15s, or the third 15s, if the school is big enough, and you try and work your way up to the first 15s until you finish. Then you join a men’s club and start playing U19S, U20s, and Colts to hopefully get into the men’s team. It’s a never-ending cycle of rugby in New Zealand.

We got talking and shared stories of rugby in the region, and that no matter where you are in the world, but especially as an expatriate, rugby clubs give you this instant group of friends and a social group that you can really rely on as you get to know them.

Calven Bland - Singapore Rugby, Development and Grassroots

“I came to Singapore on the back of my sister’s wedding and really liked it, and applied for a job. The company I was with had an office here, and about eight months later, I was posted in Singapore.

I literally landed, and within a day, someone from my sister’s school had called me up and said, ‘You’re coming down to Wanderers RFC’. I was supposed to go to another club. I was supposed to go to a club called Bucks, but I went down to Wanderers and I turned up with another guy from the same company who had arrived the same day, and I convinced him to come down.

He was a tight-head prop. I was a loose-head prop. What I hadn’t known was that the guy who had called me and told everyone that a Fijian Kiwi was coming down to play. When I turned up, I wasn’t obviously the image that they had of a strapping wing that was six feet five running down the sideline with the ball in one hand, dodging defenders.

They were a little bit disappointed, but at the same time, they just lost their front row because Singapore is a transient place, and I rocked up as a loose head, and my mate rocked up as a tight head, and they had a front row for the second team.

Like you said, it was just instant mates, and it was just a really easy transition into a new country. In fact, it was probably the easiest transition I had into a new location. And before that, I’d worked in Fiji and American Samoa. Whilst I’d played a bit of social rugby there, it wasn’t at the same level, social-wise, as it is in Singapore around the beers and the pub, and structured training. So it was really enjoyable coming to Singapore.”

Wanderers RFC Singapore – Growth Driven By Community Engagement and The Right Structures

Photo Credit- Steve Flynn – Action shots from Titans RFC U16 Team – a FREE Rugby Program, Age Group – “trying to get local boys into the sport and staying in the sport by removing any financial barriers”, said Calven Bland.

Beige told us that in his time, he had played for Wanderers, but within a year, he was soon the President of the club. “It was one of those perfect times, perfect places, and a good group of guys – we basically transformed the club from what it was. It had been a very successful club, and then it had gone into a bit of a slump, and we pulled it together.

We created an academy where we brought in a lot of local boys who were straight out of school and had finished their national service, and we became a very integrated club, and we grew. We got great sponsors on board, and we just had a really good management team building the club up.

Our growth was pretty spectacular, and we put that down to our local factors. We started having guys who were mentoring young Singaporeans who were in the club. We had some really fantastic coaches. We had an ex-England international come over and coach us, James Forrester, and I became the president of the club. We took out a few titles, and we did what had never been done in Singapore, which was the 3-peat and winning all three divisions across all three leagues, which has still not been done since.

That was a real pivotal moment for the club, and came about just from good community engagement and building this environment that people wanted to come and train and play and be part of that rugby club that we’d created.

He said he stepped down, and part of the realism was his mantra of helping set things up, but then wanting to hand over the reins. “It’s all about putting in place succession plans for good people to take over roles.”

That last aspect is so crucial. For anyone who follows our content regularly. You will constantly read that the biggest obstacle to the sport in the region is ego (from the top level down to the club and grassroots rugby).

Calven explained, “We had a really great community of people, and it was rugby that bound us together. And the thing that I’m most proud of is that I put some very strong structures in place in terms of coaching. I insisted that we have two coaches per minimum per team and that coaching plans went out, and it was top-down, which meant that players who made their way up through the grades were being taught the same things. They weren’t suddenly going into a new environment.

We were very proactive and blooding players into the next team above. Maybe I was a little bit militant as a president, but I insisted on having good people around me, and that was purely for the fact that I wanted responsible people to take over from me, and they did. If you want to build a legacy, it’s not about staying in control the whole time. It’s about giving others the tools and setting them up so that they can carry on when you step aside.

I felt that was very important for Singapore, because Singapore is quite transient, and I never knew if I was ever going to move away for work. I never did, but it was very important for me to put those processes in place.”

Singapore Club Rugby Landscape

Calven explained that there were six main rugby clubs for the men’s game in Singapore: Wanderers, Bedock, Bucks, SCC, Saints and Oldham, with another club called Blacks on the periphery. He said four of those clubs have women’s teams.

After he left the Wanderers, he was asked to join the Singapore Rugby Union, and he became a member of the board management committee, confirming he ran a number of commissions, including the competitions commission.

“I was passionate about it, and it was all about building a great competition locally. But that competition also had to have growth potential for our players, not just internally in each club, but also the growth potential of those players to move on to national honours and represent Singapore.”

He said the plans meant moving the local calendar to align with the Asia Rugby calendar of events, which meant splitting the season into pre-Christmas and post-Christmas, to have sufficient runways for players to finish the domestic league and then move into national team selection training and the competition.

He was also on the committee which successfully bought the HSBC SVNS back to Singapore, and he stepped away from his SRU roles pre-pandemic.

Titans RFC & Ruck and Rumble

Calven Bland - Singapore Rugby, Titan RFC

Calven explained that when he stepped down from Wanderers as President, he, together with two friends (Ryan Matt ‘Rhino’ Roberts and George Rippon, known as ‘Gorgeous George’), were discussing rugby development in Singapore and getting local kids playing.

“We saw a real need for another youth club, and at the time, there were four: Centaurs, TRC, SCC, and Dragons, which had youth rugby in 2013. All of them were kind of expatriate-heavy, so we got local kids involved and had this holistic approach to target it at local kids, but have expatriates too and make it a real mixed club.”

He said the main inspiration was to form a club like they remembered having back home.

“We wanted something that parents would turn up to and go, ‘Hey, this is a really good environment and not too serious’ because it’s kids’ rugby, so it should be fun.”

From starting in 2013, they have grown to just under 350 kids and 40 coaches.

“It has been quite a journey. I was involved with the Singapore Sevens and we had an opportunity, I think it was 2016 to 2017, to provide a fringe rugby tournament for the tournament. I positioned the Titans RFC to undertake that, and we came up with a concept called Titans, Ruck and Rumble. It is basically a youth tournament that’s linked to and is now an official fringe tournament of the Singapore SVNS.

The intent is to play your games and then have your finals at the Sevens during the Singapore SVNS, and it’s growing every year. It’s getting bigger and busier and more fun and a little bit more technically challenging, trying to cater to more teams. None of this would ever occur without fantastic volunteers. And those volunteers get right behind the whole concept of running a local tournament for kids to have fun.

It could be the first and only time that these kids get to play on that main field at the National Stadium, so we make that point every year, and tell the kids to enjoy the environment and take in the atmosphere. Their friends and family are in the stands, so we tell them to wave to their parents, touch the ground and feel how soft it is. It’s just a joyous rugby occasion for these young kids, and long may it continue.”

Titans RFC - Singapore

The age groups at Titans RFC ranged from U6 to U16, and a few years ago, Calven started targeting younger kids as they were losing so many who chose to play football.

“I was trying to promote rugby, and a lot of these younger kids have already been captured by football academies. So I came up with a concept called Titans Tots. We now start from age two and a half, and it’s a multi-sports program. The whole purpose of that is just to get the kids in, get them playing multi-sports, and then introduce them to rugby, introduce them to our environment, and then hopefully they stay in, and it’s working.

Our mini numbers are just exploding as all these Titans Tots just naturally transition into young U4 and U5 rugby players. So now we go from two and a half right up to Under 17, which means we’ve got enough, we’ve got a formal pathway.”

He discussed why the pathway was important, as he felt even when he was at Wanderers, with Singapore requiring National Service duties, a lot of young men would finish their junior rugby, go to their national service for two years, and when they came out, there was no link with a men’s club.

“They’ll just generally just drift around and find a club if they’re interested, or drift to another sport. So what we do now is we introduce the Wanderers to our Titans early, so that when they do go away for national service and they come back, they’ve already got a link with a men’s club, and that seems to be working as well, and we’re getting great numbers.

We did ask if the armed forces in Singapore played rugby, but to his disappointment, Calven confirmed that they used to, but they no longer do, which seems like a big loss for the pathways for the national team. He did confirm that occasionally, some of those on national service get weekends off and might play rugby on the weekends if they’ve got links with their men’s clubs

Singapore SVNS – Lessons Learned And Importance For Local Rugby

Since we spoke with Calven, World Rugby has announced the new formats for next season’s HSBC SVNS Series, and potential hosts will need to bid again. The tournament is massive for Singapore.

At the 2025 Singapore SVNS, Dan Carter, widely regarded as one of the best players to have played the game, was involved at several events, and we asked Calven if he had any key takeaways from listening to his Rugby World Cup-winning countryman speak in Singapore.

Photo Credit – Zach Franzen / World Rugby – Dan Carter as an HSBC Ambassador at Singapore SVN 2025

“I was invited to an HSBC Fireside Chat with Dan Carter and Abby Gustaitis, and it was fantastic. I’ve been to a lot of these rugby chats, and they talk about their professional career and all that, and if you’ve read his book and you’ve followed them, you kind of know it.

But what really stood out for me, and as soon as he said it, my head started buzzing, was that he said to have fun with your sport. That, to me, resonated, and he gave the example that before he became a professional rugby player, when he first started and got his first contract, he wasn’t enjoying his rugby for a number of reasons. He actually stepped away and just went back to social rugby in Canterbury, and that reignited his love of his game and playing with his mates, playing club rugby.

Have fun, you know. Just have fun. And then he turned it on us, the people in the crowd, and he said, ‘You guys need to make it fun.’ Sometimes we all get caught up in rugby, and we want to our kids to aspire to be like professional rugby players, but the big thing we need to do is we need to create that fun environment for the kids, because if they’re going to have fun in it, they’re going to stay in the sport, they’re going to create a lifelong love of the game.

That fun can be from having their mates and or it can come from just minding your P’s and Q’s a little bit as a coach or an administrator when you’re admonishing the kids for fooling around.”

Kids playing at Singapore National Stadium – Ruck and Rumble

He explained that another example was Tyla King (NZ Black Fern 7s) coming down and running a kids’ session.

“She was just a breath of fresh air for a number of reasons. She is a world-class female player, but she’s just so down-to-earth. She’s part Asian and she’s a Kiwi, and she is just a fantastic player.

She told us not to let things get in our way, set yourself some goals and have a go. If it doesn’t work, then try something else, but have a bit of fun and back yourself. In Asia, there are different pressures put on children by parents for academic reasons, so sports, unfortunately, take a bit of a backwards step when it comes to education and setting those goals.

She said, ‘If you can, as a coach, try and encourage and talk to the parents, if you see a young kid that has a lot of potential, or is good at the game, engage with the parents’ and that resonated with me so much.”