Youth development is a two way street. If a club is so called investing in youth it also needs to invest in persevering with young players to give them confidence. A player will not develop if he is constantly shipped in & out of the team for tying his bootlaces wrong. I am not surprised our young players have not developed ,either in skill or confidence,under the previous regime.

This is where we could benifit if we could put Cullen back in the picture somehow?

Cullen must be over 50 years old, if he was going to make it he would have done by now



Although persevering with him would probably give us more go-forward than we had last season.

I think PC would snap your hands off for that.

4 of our former players now at Salford, 2 at Hull KR, 1 at Leeds, 1 at Widnes. Lots that have dropped down to Championship and Championship 1 level though. A fair number that have dropped out of the game completely as well.

I have been away from the Warrington area now for years but is Rugby being played in the secondary schools in the area? If it isn't the job becomes very difficult.

It is a cemented sport in this town.

We didn’t have a team when I was school (Sankey high)

This has been the case for a long time, since Harris and Sculthorpe really, and sums up how we have lagged behind in producing players.

At the top you have the likes of Leeds, Wigan and Saints who have been able to produce players good enough to be key players in their own trophy-winning sides for large parts of their careers.

Then there are clubs like Wakey and Cas who are lower down the financial food chain but have produced players who have been picked off by richer clubs.

Warrington have produced a lot of players for whom Warrington is the biggest club they ever play for. Not since Sculthorpe have we faced the problem of big clubs circling round to take our Academy products off our hands. The only ones who have upgraded their career by leaving us were Sibbit and Cooper going to the NRL and they both ended up coming back. Generally our Academy products move to lower SL or Championship clubs when they leave us, and none of them have gone on to make us regret losing them, apart from maybe GO'B.

The other thing I'd like to see us do is be more active in picking up undervalued players from other clubs' youth systems. Kohe-Love, Harrison and Currie were good pick ups as teenagers who had come through somewhere else.

Love him or hate him,Shaun Wane gets the best out of his young lads using them for much of the season till his "injured" stars are suitably fit for the games that matter later in the season. As a result he gets experienced young players who will be able to step up to be Wigan stars of the future or who can be moved on to other SL clubs. The Wigan club also benefits from a very good local amateur network.

We really need to look at the strength of the rugby in schools and junior sections in amateur clubs. I'm too far away to get the full story but it would be really useful to compare what goes on in Warrington area compared to Wigan, Castleford etc. Kids have only so much time so if they are being channeled into tip-tap (soccer) at school there is a problem which can be difficult to solve.

I believe the new sports centre that opened in town 3 or 4 years ago was given a lot of money by the FA so football is what is provided for on the site.
The was also a statement from the RFU a couple of years ago that their aim was to get RU into every school in the country....so there should still be scope for RL to tap into schools if the intent is there.