As Australian rugby fans brace for the Wallabies' second World Cup fixture against Uruguay, Canberra fans as young as two years old are getting a taste for the game.
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Franklin mother of two Rebecca Marlow said her son Oscar, 4, and daughter Isobel, 6, had enjoyed two terms of Rugbytots training at the Lyneham Oval this winter and were barracking for another Wallabies win.
"I play rugby, I haven't been this year, but I have for many years," she said. "Rugbytots was suggested to us by one of the guys at my gym as a good way for little kids to start getting some skills up."
She said World Cup fever had taken hold at home, but luckily her two were not the types to spend the full 80 minutes jumping up and down in gold jerseys centimetres from the television screen.
"They are just starting to get a sense of the game and what it all means," she said.
"We have been talking about all the team names and where they are all from. They watched Australia and the All Blacks during the Bledisloe, but these games are the first they're really getting the idea about international tests."
Both children had been swept up in the fun of the high profile games in the past weeks but Mrs Marlow said she had noticed how beneficial involvement in the sport had been for their development.
"It teaches a lot of other skills, it is not just rugby, the kids learn how to communicate and work together as a team where everyone has their role and individual strengths," Ms Marlow said.
"Being a woman in the army as well I don't hold to gender stereotypes. I love that my daughter can just get involved and there isn't a view that certain sports are for boys or girls."
ANU associate professor of psychology Dr Evan Kidd said while some of the two-year-old Rugbytots may not yet grasp the game, the benefits of early engagement in sport was multi-layered.
"Fostering motor development has a great impact on gains in cognitive development which are things like memory and reasoning," he said.
"In group-based activities children pick up social skills too. It teaches them the idea of self-regulation so that is things like following instructions and knowing how to behave within a framework of rules which is great for school readiness."
