The ACT Brumbies are going back to school in an attempt to lure Australia's best schoolboy talent to the nation's capital, with the help of the University of Canberra.
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They're also setting up an online rugby school to continue their push into the relatively untapped USA market.
The Brumbies are offering five scholarships to study any course at UC next year, with the budding young talent also going into the Super Rugby club's academy program.
Brumbies chief executive Michael Jones said the academy had been running a long time, but the focus on it had "ebbed and flowed".
He wanted to regenerate it to become an important development tool for the two-time Super Rugby champions.
Jones said they wanted to develop as much of their own talent as they could, rather than relying on signing players from interstate.
"We've got five scholarships with UC that they've granted for us to bring in elite schoolboys to do degrees and develop as part of the [Brumbies] academy," he told Fairfax Media.
"We're also close to signing an agreement with a third party education deliver for doing below university diplomas and certificates to get young guys into the program here.
"We're trying to bolster our academy level ... to try to have multiple pathways for the development of players, rather than just poaching them from all over the place.
"[We want] to develop talent and grow it here ... rather than having to attract and pay huge dollars for established players."
Jones said a renewed academy focus would also allow them to stop using the Brumbies Super Rugby squad as "guinea pigs".
He said in the past they'd used the senior squad to experiment with strength and conditioning, training techniques, but they could use the academy instead to test ideas.
"The Brumbies academy has been going for quite a long time, but it's ebbed and flowed as far as what it does," Jones said.
"I've been formalising that so that it's basically becoming a centre of excellence.
"The high performance unit will be a client of the academy, so if they want to look at new technologies we'll test it out and prove it in the academy first and then roll it."
He also said they were looking at running residential rugby schools and also setting up an online rugby training program in the USA through the Arizona State University.
The Brumbies had already set-up an academy at ASU, with coach Stephen Larkham travelling to the USA last year to conduct camps in search of talent.
They currently have former American footballer Chris Coyle, who went to ASU, training with their National Rugby Championship squad in the hope he could play Super Rugby.
Jones said Brumbies coaches and players would go to the USA to run clinics.
"We're looking at running four residential schools a year over in the States, as well as online education ... but you still need the contact so we'll be taking coaches over there, and players, to run elite programs," he said.
Jones said they were also looking into building a scrum machine to allow them to measure and analyse their scrum.
