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.

The reason Wane can do that is because Wigan produce enough good players that they can field a side with a lot of young players and they can still hold their own in SL with good sides. We don't produce enough good players so we can't do that - if we fielded sides packed with our Academy players in SL in order to give them experience they would get hammered.

Remember what the reaction was like on here, when TS rested senior players a few times back in the days of the top 8 playoffs, and stuck young lads in the squad instead, people were saying "if the club can't be bothered taking this league game seriously then why should the fans bother turning up?" and saying what a mockery it was that we had 6 months of meaningless games before the playoffs.

I think basically it is difficult. RFU's aim was totally unrealistic. Heads of schools and PE Teachers still have freedom as to which sports are taught in their school. Grabbing a top bloke from another area and splashing a bit of limited cash is not guaranteed to produce results. Lots must have looked at Wigan and tried to replicate how they produce rugby players but it ain't just about "if the intent is there". Mind you you've got to try.

Lets hope that this guy can actually spot junior talent without you having to pay top dollar to poach them from other SL clubs?

That’s sounding a little bitter there Chin... last year we only had two overseas players, plenty of our own academy and a few big names ‘bought in’...

How many other clubs had such a home-grown core in the last few years? Didn’t do us any good, all we won was a league leaders shield. Now we are restructuring the club from the bottom up and it’s looking promising. In the meantime while we wait for that to bear fruit, we’ll spend what we need to in order to chase success. Fortunately we can afford to, and that’s not something I’m going to feel embarrassed about.

With the occasional gem, we will always be in a position of weakness when we rely on signing young players that are rejected by their own club for not being good enough.

This is not the case at all.
I've already posted about Warrington paying latge contract fees for young talent. Wire arnt after anyone's cast offs. TS made some bizarre signings when he had unquestioned control over ins and outs, but that era has gone. The board has a grip.

In the later TS years we seem to have a larger group of home-grown players being involved with the first team than for a long time. But I wouldn't describe it as a home-grown core. Currie, Cooper and Patton are in the core, then there are a lot of others who come in and out of the side but haven't established themselves as anything more than fringe players in SL.

I don't think this increase in home-grown players being involved is due to the quality of products from our Academy increasing, its been because the quality of our recruitment generally has declined so it's become easier to get in our team.

It's the reverse of what happened in the Cullen era. The early Cullen era, around the time we left Wilderspool was the last time we had a strong home-grown presence in the core of the team: Lee Penny, Sibbitt, Hilton, Wood, Wainwright, Noone, Mark Gleeson, Hulse and Stevens were all regulars in the 17.

By the time Cullen left, it was down to Riley, Wood, Cooper, Pickersgill and Mark Gleeson, but the quality of players brought in from outside had increased a lot.

Pickersgill and Mark Gleeson then left and in the early successful days of the TS era, we were down to Wood, Riley and Cooper plus a few around the fringes like McCarthy, Williams, Evans and GO'B. Towards the end of the TS era there was an increase in the numbers of home-grown players being involved around the fringes but still only a few in the core 17.

Sorry, I should have used a different term, as I actually meant ‘Home Grown’ as in ‘UK-reared’. It was a response to an increasing trend of fans of other clubs claiming we rely on buying in young players, when their own clubs in fact rely on overseas players rather than their own products or Super League stock.

But yes, we haven’t really had a ‘core’ of Warrington academy players for a while, despite what seemed like a good bunch of talented youngsters from both local teams and as far afield as Wales and France. I think we put too much responsibility in the hands of one man, when we should looked at what works for other clubs with a proven track record for getting the young players to transition successfully. I don’t believe it’s purely down to the talent spotting, as you only need to watch early videos of the likes of the Evans Brothers to see what potential existed in the academy.

Be interesting to see if Rhys Evans & Brad Dwyer can regain their early promise under a different coach.