Hi all, my name is Mitch and during 2024-2025 I was heavily involved with helping to build and grow a small Rugby Union community in Yogyakarta Indonesia.

Indonesia is a beautiful and large archipelago nation, made up of many different ethnicities, religions and traditions. Yogyakarta is a perfect example of this. Being a ‘student city’ young people from all over Indonesia live there to complete their education.

Now Rugby is not a sport commonly played in Indonesia, and the small amount of domestic competitions are usually played between teams made up heavily of Western expats living in Jakarta and Bali.

But Yogyakarta is lucky enough to have a committed team of volunteers who have spent years spreading awareness of the sport building up the Rugby community in the area.

But even without often playing competitive Rugby, Sleman Sembada PRUI offers all the benefits that come along with serious community engagement. Young people are engaging in healthy activities, building social connections

As such, there are now a large committed group of young people who train three times a week and are continually improving and teaching other newcomers to the sport.

Most of these players come from low socioeconomic backgrounds and Rugby Union becomes a low cost way for them to build friendships, new skills and engage in healthy activity.

Due to logistical challenges, Sleman Sembada really only gets to compete in a domestic competition once a year: the Jakarta Rugby 10s weekend.

They are one of the only local Indonesian clubs made up almost entirely of Indonesian nationals and last year their female team won the Tier 2 competition, and the men’s team won the Tier 4 tournament. These are incredible results for such a little community.

From this, 4 of the men’s players were rewarded with selection for the Indonesian National Team in the SEA Rugby 7s comp that just took place in Singapore. 

This year they aim to compete again, but are faced with the same logistical challenges. As such, this fundraiser has been created in order to help fund the travel, registration and accomodation costs associated with the club entering into the Jak10’s.

Any additional funds will be used by the club to buy the necessary equipment and supplies, help fund training programs for medics, match officials and coaches, as well as contributing to field hire for training sessions.