Star coach George Simpkin who was a top motivator with the Sri Lanka team and the coach of club side Kandy SC died last Thursday in New Zealand after a battle with cancer at the age of 77.
He was also head coach and technical director of Hong Kong and Fiji and is credited with introducing rugby to China which is now a force in Asian rugby.
Simpkin was also one of the pioneers of the world famous Hong Kong Sevens and continuously recommended changes to the shorter format of the sport which proved extremely useful to make the show more interesting while saving on valuable time.
Simpkin first arrived in Sri Lanka to coach Kandy SC and later took over the reins of the Sri Lanka team as its coach and motivator.
He was the man who mooted the idea to start the Singer-SriLankan Sevens which was organized by Kandy SC and well backed by Malik Samarawickrema and Iswan Omar.
He was a well travelled former Waikato rugby coach in New Zealand and later transformed rugby in Hong Kong where he discovered that the sport should spread beyond the enclave of the white man.
He did a time management study of Sevens rugby which included the quick lineout throw-in, drop-kicks for try conversions, ball boys/girls retrieving the ball, the try-scoring team kicking off at the restart and hookers binding under the props at scrum time.
Simpkin was not just a mentor to many rugby players across Asia. He will be missed by the entire rugby world in the Asian sector. An innovative thinker, he made his name as the longest serving Waikato provincial coach in New Zealand.Before that the Northland-born school teacher Simpkin had taken a talent-laden Matamata College First XV team on a 56-match winning streak.