“They want to grow rugby across the board, but they know to do that it needs to be on the back of some success at the elite level. We are helping them with that,” said the Canterbury and Crusaders chief executive, Hamish Riach. “Their ambitions are high and they are striving for some pretty big goals over the next period of time. They are shooting for the stars, and good on them. It was part of that attitude that attracted us to the partnership.”

“They know where they sit, and they want to be better than where they currently are and are looking at ways to do that,” he added.

The agreement with the New Zealanders has resulted in Darryn Collins’s becoming a full-time trainer for the Brazil Rugby Union, assisting top-level players and working on the union’s high-performance plan, while three Canterbury coaches — Tabai Matson, Scott Robertson and Steve Frew — helped to prepare the men’s XVs team for the South American Consur A championship earlier this year.

Frew returned to Brazil last week to coach the team as it prepared for its 2015 Rugby World Cup qualifier against Paraguay on Oct. 27.

He was joined by former New Zealand sevens star Dallas Seymour, who will coach the men’s and women’s sevens teams and assist Frew with the XVs. Both will stay until the end of the month. The coaches will continue to return to Brazil at regular intervals.

Seymour’s playing background includes four World Sevens Series titles, two Sevens World Cup crowns and a Commonwealth Games gold medal.

The Brazil women’s sevens side is already the top-ranked team in South America. It competed on the I.R.B. Women’s Sevens Challenge series this year, while the men returned to the world stage for the first time since 2002, when they played in the Las Vegas round of the HSBC Sevens World Series.