Tomasi Cama, the Fiji-born playmaker who terrorised Fiji with his uncanny skills, has been named head coach of the All Blacks 7s for the 2024 season.
The former player has been with the team as an assistant coach, under Clark Laidlaw, for six seasons and will take charge of the team through to the Paris Olympics next July.
Cama has been a part of the All Blacks 7s as a player and coach for 18 years and said he had to think hard about stepping up into the head coach position.
Following in the sevens footsteps of his father, also named Tomasi Cama who played internationally for Fiji, ‘Junior’ went to New Zealand to pursue a career in rugby in 1999 and said he is grateful to have worked with some great coaches since then.
“I was fortunate enough to be coached by Dave Rennie at Manawatu and I learnt a lot from him about the detail and planning he put into coaching,” Cama told allblacks.com
“From Titch (Sir Gordon Tietjen), it was about hard work and really dedicating yourself to whatever it is you are doing while with Clark (Laidlaw) he was big on the connection piece and getting relationships right.”
Cama is one of five New Zealand men to have won World Rugby’s Sevens Player of the year, in 2012 – the same year he won the Richard Crawshaw Memorial for New Zealand Sevens Player of the Year.
He has won Commonwealth Games gold and the Rugby World Cup Sevens as both a player and coach, taking part in a total of 128 international tournaments. Cama is the all-time leading points scorer for the All Blacks 7s and has scored the second most points in the history of the Sevens World Series.
