John Manenti has resigned because the Australian males’s rugby sevens workforce head coach to take up a training alternative in the USA in 15-man rugby.
It’s understood by The Roar that Rugby Australia needed to re-sign Manenti to a four-year deal however the skilled coach believes that until he makes the bounce to the 15-a-side recreation quickly his window of alternative will shut.
Inside minutes of RA’s assertion, the San Diego Legion Main League Rugby facet introduced Manenti as their new head coach.
Manenti had been a part of the Australian sevens program since 2015, beginning as an assistant coach earlier than shifting into the highest jobs for each the boys’s and girls’s groups, and was concerned in three Olympic Video games campaigns.
The 53-year-old was part of Tim Walsh’s teaching workforce that oversaw Australia’s girls’s Olympic gold success in Rio in 2016.
Within the current Paris Video games, he led the workforce to fourth place – a highest end at an Olympics for the boys’s workforce.
Manenti’s facet received the 2021-2022 World Rugby Sevens sequence. The following season, Manenti’s males’s workforce received the Hong Kong Sevens – snapping a 34-year drought alongside the best way.
“I’ve had 9 fantastic years within the Sevens program with each males’s and girls’s groups,” Manenti mentioned in an announcement.
“What we’ve achieved collectively prior to now three years has been unbelievable and I really feel we’ve been a part of probably the most profitable period in Aussie males’s sevens.
Australia 7s head coach John Manenti speaks to gamers after the 2023 Sydney Sevens match between Australia and Canada at Allianz Stadium on January 28, 2023 in Sydney, Australia. (Picture by Matt King/Getty Photographs)
“We’ve received a World Sequence, gold medals in Hong Kong and London, completed on a number of podiums, achieved automated Olympic qualification and loved best-ever Olympic outcomes.
“I’m extraordinarily pleased with the gamers and employees for our achievements. For me it’s time now to return to 15s and proceed my development as a coach, with the ambition to contribute to Tremendous Rugby at some stage.
“The sevens program is properly set as much as go on to greater and higher outcomes and I stay up for following the development.
“I’d wish to thank Rugby Australia for the privilege of teaching the boys’s and girls’s nationwide groups.”
Rugby Australia director of excessive efficiency Peter Horne thanked Manenti within the assertion.
“John has completed an amazing job with the Sevens groups, notably when he took over the boys’s program, and we’d wish to thank him for his efforts,” Horne mentioned.
“The 2021-2022 World Sequence victory for the boys’s facet was a serious spotlight for John and everybody at Rugby Australia, together with the workforce’s efforts on the current Paris Olympics.”
Lengthy-time Australian sevens coach John Manenti is shifting. (Picture by Nicholas Ward/ Rugby Australia)
Manenti has lengthy hoped to return to the XV-person recreation.
Certainly, the previous Shute Protect successful coach, who performed an element in Eastwood’s dominance a decade in the past, twice got here near taking on on the Waratahs.
But it surely was typically thought of that Manenti didn’t have sufficient expertise, together with head teaching expertise within the skilled recreation, for Tremendous Rugby franchises to take a lead of religion on him.
Now, Manenti will transfer to the USA’s MLR competitors to attempt to reboot his profession in 15s to place himself within the entrance store window.
Who takes over from Manenti stays to be seen.
Former nationwide sevens star James Stannard, who has served as Manenti’s assistant since hanging up the boots, is the apparent substitute.
However whether or not or not his lack of head teaching expertise performs towards him stays to be seen.
