The rug­by fra­ter­ni­ty was plunged in­to mourn­ing fol­low­ing the pass­ing of its vice pres­i­dent Carl Sey­mour on Sun­day. He was 67 years.

Sey­mour, who is con­sid­ered one of the brains on the sport's ex­ec­u­tive, died on Sun­day from a heart at­tack. He had just re­cov­ered from a stroke he suf­fered a cou­ple of years ago and was key to strate­gis­ing a way for­ward for lo­cal rug­by, said Col­in Pe­ters, pres­i­dent of the T&T Rug­by Foot­ball Union (TTR­FU).

Pe­ters yes­ter­day de­scribed Sey­mour's death as a huge loss to the sport, say­ing he was some­one you could have called on at any time.

Sey­mour was the dri­ving force be­hind the rug­by ex­ec­u­tive's new strate­gic plan which was com­plet­ed at an Ex­ec­u­tive Com­mit­tee Meet­ing on No­vem­ber 7. He be­came vice pres­i­dent of the TTR­FU in 2018, where he served with dis­tinc­tion.

A re­lease from the TTR­FU said Sey­mour was a long-stand­ing mem­ber of the rug­by fra­ter­ni­ty who start­ed his ca­reer at Queen’s Roy­al Col­lege (QRC) in 1965 as the team cap­tain.

It not­ed: "While at QRC, he joined the Roy­alians rug­by foot­ball club (RFC), where he played on both the first and sec­ond rug­by teams un­til the 1980s. He was an as­sis­tant coach of the Roy­alians women’s team in 2017/18 and a mem­ber of the men’s Un­der-19 na­tion­al rug­by team.

"Carl re­mained faith­ful to Roy­alians RFC as the longest-serv­ing ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the club, main­ly as hon­orary sec­re­tary. He be­came pres­i­dent for the first time in 1985 and went on to serve in this po­si­tion for a num­ber of terms, the last of which was in 2019. He was al­so the main or­gan­is­er of the club’s 20th and 50th an­niver­sary cel­e­bra­tions."

Since his pass­ing, TTR­FU has been bom­bard­ed with mes­sages from lo­cal re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al or­gan­i­sa­tions, all send­ing con­do­lences to the fam­i­ly of Sey­mour, in­clud­ing Rug­by Amer­i­ca North (RAN) and World Rug­by.