Bermuda officials hope next week’s Ariel Re Bermuda Sevens tournament will be the first step on the road to qualifying for the Hong Kong Sevens.

Roughly 30 of the island’s best up-and-coming rugby players will be involved in the event at the National Sports Centre, where they will get to pit themselves against some of the best the United States and Canada has to offer.

US powerhouses Dartmouth, Yale and Kutztown are among nine colleges and university’s sending teams for the tournament, while three high schools, Greenwich High School, Stanstead College and West Chester Boys High School are also taking part.

And while developing the Bermuda Sevens programme is high on the agenda, exposing the island’s best young athletes to schools with scholarship opportunities is not far behind.

“The entire motivation [for the tournament] was to help the Bermuda Sevens team develop,” Tom Healy, the Bermuda coach, said.

“When we play in a Sevens tournament [overseas] there is a substantial cost involved, and this has been holding some players back.

“Sevens is a younger man’s game and some of the kids haven’t been following through because they don’t have disposable income to finance these trips. “

The players Bermuda’s teams will face next Friday and Saturday possess varying degrees of skill.

Some are knocking on the door for the USA Eagles and the Olympics in August, others play in teams that regularly challenge for honours at tournaments in the US.

While this tournament was not necessarily motivated by the Bermuda Rugby Football Union’s desire to “see where we are in the pecking order,” Healy believes that the island’s teams should be able to win several games next weekend.

What Bermuda officials would like to see are the students that are excelling in the school leagues given a taster of what rugby can offer them.

That motivation is not entirely altruistic, the hope is that the depth of the Bermuda Sevens squad will also increase and the team will become more competitive as a result.

“The game is booming in the US at the moment, and there are 11 different schools, with 11 different coaches, and 11 different scholarship opportunities coming to Bermuda,” Healy said.

“Given what we are seeing at the schoolboy level [in Bermuda] there are some serious athletes out there.

“Their tunnel vision is to go to the cricket or soccer route, this is all about giving them something to play for, exposing them to rugby and hopefully that has a trickle-down effect into the national side.”

Although Rugby Sevens has become an Olympic sport, Bermuda’s visions for improvement do not extend that far, especially in a region that includes the United States and Canada. However, qualifying for the Hong Kong event, one of the most prestigious tournaments on the Sevens calendar is not out of the question.

That though requires an influx of new blood, new talent, and a squad strong enough to cope with the rigours of what Healy calls “a young man’s game”.

“The squad has been getting progressively older, there are very few new faces coming in, and this is to expose the kids to what’s out there, try to get them to stick with it, and make their way into the senior squad,” Healy said.

“The ultimate goal for the Sevens programme is to qualify for Hong Kong, and we’ve seen that if we had got the bounce of the ball over the past couple of years we could have been through.

“We’re not a million miles away, we just need some new faces and especially some athletic guys.”