Quote: HouriganTiger "sorry, but i have read the thread with interest, and the first thing that hit me when i read your statements was 'cart before the horse'. surely before/during the time in which you decide/plan to form a new side in such a challenging area/community, you would explore these boundries (bolded for ref) before making any commitment. it actually makes you look incapable. view it as market research or R&D!!'"
You're seeing an amateur rugby league club as a business. It is a quasi-business in that it's outlay must be covered by its income. But it is something you want to set up in an area because you want to play/have rugby league in your area beacuse you think "it's worth it" rather than because you think it's a market to be tapped with an income stream to be simply drawn upon!
What you do is start small, identify the barriers as you go and try to overcome them. As you do, you keep an eye on your costs and income and occasionally, take a few risks to get that club off the ground. If I had started with my list of barriers - no players (unsurprising given there is no rugby league club!), no pitch, no money and just said "bugger it, that's too hard" then there would be no Bury Broncos and no rugby league club in a Borough with a population of 180,000 people!
This is how clubs organically develop - and it remains part of our constitution (and is incidentally, what I think we should be very proud of) that we exist to provide opportunities to the people of Bury - unlike many overnight clubs that have popped up in summer in development areas in the north we havent flooded our club with players from RL areas. I've been to a fair few summer games and seen a side full of NWC players, often from outside the immediate area - how does that help teh game as a whole grow? In Bury, many players were utter novices when they started with us (we had another first time novice train with us last night) and we have ensured throughout that local lads get their chance - out of 35 people who have worn a shirt this year, only 4 live outside the Borough's boundary.
It started in Bury with an open meeting December 2008. I was there (I live in the very south of the Borough) and another guy who lived near Bury town centre. I said I could probably get 7 players (people I knew) and he said similar - and from January we were training once a week as a mess-about session open to anyone who wanted to turn up.
So, we had an idea that there were about 20 people who maybe* wanted to play. That was our market.
I then spent a lot of time that summer talking to the Council and anyone who would listen trying to find a place to play, some money, a social venue etc. - where there was a barrier, I sought to overcome it.
By August 2008 came the big decision. We had a sponsor who would put £1k in to get us started, I was weighing up a Sportsmatch application using that sponsors money, we had c. 20 lads who might play, and I had found a school pitch that we could use (although at a silly price!).
The question was should we enter NWC and take the risk given that 20 lads wouldn't really be enough for a full season week in week out, we would need to sign up to £1k of costs for pitch hire and would need an outlay of c. £2k on equipment (including 2 kits) as well as £1,600 to use an all-weather pitch under floodlights to train. We took the risk, we budgeted carefully starting with a borrowed kit before buying our first in October and second at season end and we just about got through that fist year and then a second with the number of players rising to about 30.
Going into summer 2010 I started having detailed discussions with another school about it being a 'home' to the club, and then Cronus on the clubs behalf visited a Cricket club to see if they could become our social venue. The two sites were two minutes walk apart. We did a deal with the school saying we would focus junior development work there, we would pay for posts and pitch marking, and we would support them in grant applications etc. if they became our playing base. We helped get £5k for works to the school allowing us to have access to the changing rooms without having access to the rest of the school and we now use the school for FREE as a result, it cost us £1,300 up front but will save us every year from now on.
This week, we have negotiated with the school again so that we can use it as a training base and have storage space and have done a more formal deal with the cricket club so its our permament social base again for this summer. In April we will run a two day Easter Camp for juniors and aim to run two junior sides this summer alongside our open age. And although we occasionally concede a game because we still lack depth of experience we will finish 7th in Div 5 of NWC winning 8 games. In year 1 and year 2 we won just 2 games yet still kept that core of novice lads togther. As we go into summer this year we hope to have 30+ lads again and hopefully another group of newbies to the game to convert. All of this from small steps over three years.
So...that's how a club can develop with its sole focus on giving people opportunities to play RL and with all our revenue recycled back into expanding those opportunities. It will still be hard - our average age is close to 30 so we need a flow through but we'll keep going because "it'll be too hard" wasnt our attitude at the start and hasnt been at any point since.
The reason I put all that down was because i'm currently worried that the RFL have forgotten that such organic processes exist and that, in my view, an organic RL club focussed on RL development is better than an overnight club using players from an outside area and operating from an RU club (who are after the revenues they can grab rather than actually increasing RL participation more often than not).
The form that we had to fill in for this summer had conditions such as a social bar on the same site as a pitch (ours is still 100yds away but so what!?), dug-outs, permament pitch surrounds etc.. No offence, but no organic club could have those overnight!!! and the bonus point for fielding 13 players rule in the Merit League is barmy! surely a comp designed to help clubs get off the ground should reward a development side for turning up with 11 if that is all they have?! Why enter at all if your penalised for trying?!
