We are excited to announce Marcell Muller as our 2019 NextGenRugga Rugby Player of the Year. He received the most emails for the award and it is clear that his story was a real inspiration to young players.
Marcell was overlooked in 2019 by a lot of people and nobody knew about him at the start of the year. He started for the 2nd team of Grey College in 2019 with a couple of first team appearances for them of the bench. Midway through the season it was clear that Marcell was one of the best players at his position and he was a try scoring machine. He earned his spot on the first team and then there was no looking back, he took his chance and became an integral part of the best schoolboy team in the world. He started in 8 games for the Grey College 1st XV and scored 16 tries with 3 hat tricks( vs HTS Middelburg, Grey High and Waterkloof), He also played in 5 games of the bench where he scored 5 tries. It’s scary to think about how many tries he could’ve scored if he had started all of the games.
Even with the amazing year he had, he was told to not even attend trials for the Free State Craven Week because he won’t get selected due to the quota system. This is when we decided to help him and his dad and make a video of him to show to teams around the world, including Universities in the USA for the possibility of playing American Football at Division 1 level. His video blew up and got viral and he got a lot of interest from all over the world. The guy was so talented and athletic that Universities from the US was wiling to fly over to SA to scout him. The sad part about all of this was that even with all of the interest from teams overseas, Marcell did not manage to get one offer from a SA team, other than the Blitzbokke Academy team but Marcell wanted to play 15 man rugby. To make it clear, Marcell and his dad would’ve loved for him to stay in SA but with no interest from any team, they had to look for offers overseas.
Despite him being overlooked in SA he became one of the most dominant high school players in recent memory and played with a chip on his shoulder. He is a big inspiration to younger players and we wish him all of the luck at Montpelier and we know that the world is going to know his name in a few years time.
