Huddersfield were rated
1
1
2
Overall 2

Despite building one of the best indoor training centres in the game, Hudds were marked down because the training centre and the indoor barn, the 3G and the grass fields they use are about three quarters of a mile apart. The inspectors feel that to be an issue because it involves moving players (particularly Scholarship) from one location to another.

There's very little Huddersfield can do about that situation but it's plainly ridiculous to use that as a reason for not giving them an outstanding!

I'm pleased there are so many "outstanding" and "good" academies out there. Although I'd prefer a little less qualitative and hell of a lot more quantitative metrics.

Management is measurement, or so they say ...

Assessing a club or an academy will always (and should be) qualitative rather than quantitative. It'd be like saying Leeds academy is worse now than it was 10/12 years ago because there isn't another Sinfield, McGuire, Burrow, Diskin etc group coming through.


Agree. It's daft to do things like that, especially as, bizarrely, the overall grade is automatically the lowest grade of the 3 seperate criteria.

Since the report, which labelled Salford 'weak' we have beaten both Leeds and Widnes academies who coincidentally were given an 'outstanding' score. Josh Wood will also make his debut tonight against Warrington, the third academy player to do this season.

Yeah that's how the assessments work.

Just saying, considering our leadership and management, delivery and meeting of players need are so weak they're not doing too bad. Ryan Lannon, Matty Gee and now Josh Wood also making the step-up so far this season suggests things perhaps aren't as weak as the RFL would have you believe.

I haven't seen the respective line ups but it's possible that Leeds & Widnes played a large number of Yr1 Academy players ie U17s against U19s.

They may have felt that to be the appropriate level of challenge for their younger Academy players

And yet when asked to rely on your juniors, like other SL clubs, in the midst of the injury/suspension crisis we were told, by your own fans, that they weren't ready and/or good enough. So which is it? Are they any good or not?!

Does anyone actually take these scores seriously ??? We have brought the current man of steel through as well as the former England u19s captain. We made top 4 last year and went to wembley with a predominantly home grown squad. id rather my club carry on doing this and getting a bad score on a silly assessment.

It isn't so much based on quantities on players brought in but other factors like facilities

As I said, they give an indication over a period of years scores.

The fact that Clark came through Cas' academy isn't indicative of anything. Neither is one season's results at first team level. (Btw I make it as 14 out of Cas' announced squad of 30 were homegrown and 5/6 would be in the first choice 17 in 2014.)
Consistently training and developing youngsters to a high standard alongside other issues such as player welfare, training facilities etc is.

Without our youth setup constantly bringing SL players
Through cas are Hunslet, it's the only thing that keeps us as a top flight club, I'd rather us keep producing players for ourselves and the rest of the league rather than spending our limited resources on silly courses for players that won't make it to score higher on a silly assessment