It did not take Mark Hewitt, the West Indies coach, very long to switch hats. Within an hour of elimination from the Emirates Airline Wales Sevens at the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff, last Sunday, Hewitt went back to his day job - regional development officer for the West Indies Rugby Union.

Hewitt is determined that the good work of the past fortnight is not stranded - rather appropriate given the topography of the nations that make up this quite extraordinary new entry into world sevens.

"My biggest concern after doing all this is that we can't let it be a one-off," Hewitt said. "We are struggling with funding, and without funding we cannot do anything. But I think we've got to build on that, we can't go backwards. We've got to go forward.

"The committee have got to do a lot of work, we've got to find a major sponsor to just fund our sevens programme. If we can compete in two World Sevens Series tournaments and do another couple of tournaments around the world or around Europe or in America, we've got to do that because that's the only way we're going to go forward, honestly."

The worry about sponsorship coincides with a disturbing lack of awareness of the sevens game in the region. Such matters are not helped by the scant coverage afforded in Britain where the inability of the home nations to impact on the dominance by the southern hemisphere has resulted in low spectator turnout. The Sunday Times hit on the subject in an article that decried the fall in popularity of sevens rugby only eight years after England won the inaugural Rugby World Cup Sevens.

A large percentage of the 10,000 who watched the London Sevens finals at Twickenham and the 7,000 who journeyed to Millennium Stadium, were foreign residents. The International Rugby Board ran television coverage in-house, with a cameo appearance by Sky on the first weekend. But, while New Zealand, Australia and Fiji, the leading exponents of the shortened version, continue to field high-quality teams, England have turned to players who are not regulars in their Premiership teams, their resources drained by the coincidence of tours to Australia (Lions) and North America.

Hewitt admits readily that, when he was a player, sevens carried little appeal, but he has become a convert. "You do not need to understand the game to be able to appreciate sevens," he said. "It is fast, free-flowing with spectacular tries and is over in 14 minutes. The 15-a-side game can be a bit overwhelming because of the rules, unlike rugby league."

He is careful not to write off the conventional code, but the impression is that sevens is the area in which Hewitt believes West Indies rugby can make the most impact.

"My big thing now is to get all these tapes together, get a tape of all these cuttings from the tournaments and give them to every union, so we can actually get some coverage out there. That's the other thing that we're lacking - noone knows this is going on. We need to get videos so we can go to the schools and show the kids that 'you could be here playing in this' and recruit more people, but my biggest concern is that we don't go backwards and there's always a possibility of that."

Hewitt was more than satisfied with the effort the players gave throughout the two weeks, but their enthusiasm was betrayed often by a lack of tactical nous.

"We just lose our way slightly," the coach said. "If we are to improve on what we've done here we need to improve our fitness levels and technical abilities, but we have a starting base here."

Having the team together for successive tournaments proved helpful but among the pitfalls of running an amateur team was lack of preparation.

"We were actually very well prepared for Hong Kong (in March)," Hewitt said. "We managed to get some sponsorship and we had a training camp in Canada where we played some tournaments. When we got invited to London, that was our plan initially, to play a tournament prior. We would have ironed a lot of our problems out by then, but we're not a professional team and we didn't have the finances so we could do that.

"On a brighter note, it's good to be involved in these competitions and we will get better as we go along. In two years' time, we've got to be looking to be able to compete with the likes of Portugal, Georgia, Spain, that level. We can do that. We've got good athletes, there's no problem why we can't catch up with these guys."