For those of you who have management that forward only items from one organisation....thought you might be interested in seeing this which was distributed earlier this week
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“What can BARLA do for you“

BARLA is a pivotal organisation whose forward thinking has been essential to the growth of Rugby League Football all around the world.

BARLA, in the early 1980’s, were the think tank that brought you the National Development Scheme and The National Coaching Scheme. Both schemes were highly successful and remain, although renamed, essential to today’s continued growth and development. We also became the first organisation to Offer international tours to the “Amateur Player” and still promote the same today.

BARLA offers top quality cup competitions in heartland counties as well as the National Cup competition which still holds the world record of attracting 221 teams for a rugby competition from either code. This has always been regarded as the best competition that any amateur team or player can win.

BARLA has always provided, and will continue to offer, a high quality insurance policy as well as an independent arbitration body should matters need addressing.

In 1973, and with the 13 a side code in decline, BARLA was formed. The RFL was controlled by thirty professional clubs and the amateurs hadn’t any say or vote in their own destiny. Ironically in 2010, and after the majority of BARLA’s responsibilities have - through unification - been handed to the RFL, the 13 a side code is once again in serious decline and the amateurs are losing their right to control their destinies, BARLA are once again ready to rise to the challenge to secure our sports future.

When you look at modern day Amateur Rugby League everything you see is the direct result of BARLA’s passion to promote and grow Rugby League. We recognise Grassroots rugby as the essential part of that growth and we will promote the ethos of “Rugby for All”, rather than the “rugby for the elite”. We strive to maintain our current league base and represent all clubs with amateur status. Whilst maintaining our strong national cup competitions it is our aim to develop new and existing competitions which will encompass all amateur players nationally

Perhaps if instead of throwing hundreds of thousands of pounds at RFL "community" staff wages the money had instead been invested through BARLA into the infrastructure of the Amateur game you might have already found winter floodlit training.

I agree it's not particularly that people want to move away from BARLA - but I'd go so far as to say there are people within organisations that DO want you to though.

The training conditions might be better (though I doubt free in all cases) - what worries me is that there is no proof that numbers will boost especially when married with the rules and conditions the RFL want to bring in.

I think BARLA's point of "promoting the ethos of Rugby for All" and not "for the elite" is well made and will come back to haunt the gameas it gradually is forced to move to summer (whether you like it or not) - you only have to look at the latest directive (sorry info bulletin) from the NCL management - it reads like a bribe of £4,700 per club to move to summer - that money should be distributed properly in the game not just used to target each area as and when they need them to switch.

The money secured by the RFL was revenue and not capital. It was also targeted at participation. These would have been aligned to the funding providers targets and what teh RFL did (very well) was design its programme of activities in such a way as to draw down funds. It is naive to make the statement above.

BARLA may have been promoting the ethos of the game but they simply havent delivered what was required to get new clubs and increased participation off the ground. the BARLA leagues are not conducive to starting up new clubs / attracting new players.

Which bit was naive?

Was the money secured by the RFL extra funding or what would have been handed to BARLA if unification had not taken place? I think if those formerly employed by BARLA (now ironicaly being employed by the RFL) had still been with BARLA, then similar funding would still have been received, only by BARLA and perhaps not the RFL.

Is the RFL not simply the receiver these days of the funding and dictates what goes where and to who depending on, as you correctly state, their particular targets (read interests)?

I think this is where perhaps you are being naive, as it's clear that funding is being directed in such a manner as to woo particular groups one at a time (see the latest from the NCL) and not necessarily for the good of the game in general.

I think if you look around, there are new clubs in the BARLA leagues, to make such a sweeping statement to the contrary is at best ill thought out and worse possibly lazy and inaccurate.

the naivity is that the funder is Sport England who have targets etc. and they give out the funding based on the recipients ability to deliver against those targets. the money from Sport England has to be bidded for - it wasnt allocated to rugby league but simply to 'sport' and the RFL bid against many otehr sports for its share. to think that BARLA would have just been 'given it' is simply wrong. and to say that 'the RFL is just the receiver' shows that naivety. The RFL bid for Sport England funds to fund a 3 year programme of activity to increase participation (which Sport England has set for it as a target by DCMS). The RFL bid was was successful in securing teh highest amount of funding into RL from Government ever and the RFL will be held to account to spend the money the way they said they would when they secured it.

so, to answer the specific points:

1. No, the funding would not have gone to to BARLA

2. No, the RFL does not have the flexibility to spend money on anything it wants. It spends it on what it was funded to spend the money on by Sport England. As the funding was revenue, it could not be spent on capital facilities (which you said BARLA would have done in the earlier post).

and i set up a new club in a BARLA league. not easy and not helped by BARLA. and i've seen plenty of new clubs go to the wall - not helped by BARLA.

BARLA have done precisely naff all to help us establish our club in a football/RU area. We've struggled to find players, we've struggled to find training facilities and we've struggled to find a pitch.

Bury Council own a superb facility: home to Bury RU and cricket - but they won't entertain us. The council have told us they won't convert ANY of the dozens of football pitches into a RL pitch as they're all booked up. There are very few floodlit areas and we can't use any of the grass ones.

Meanwhile, those RFL staff you complain about have gone into the local schools and started working hard. Directly on the back of this, the school which acts as our current home ground kicked out Sedgley Tigers (a major RU club) in favour of the RFL programme. Also as a direct result (and mmp's hard work), they agreed to let us mark out a pitch (we still had to raise the money to buy the posts ourselves) and move in. There are also local school teams now popping up. We're even looking at playing double-headers this year: U-15s followed by open age.

I've seen more development and work from the RFL in the last 2 years than I've EVER seen from BARLA. I'm not anti-BARLA by any means, in fact I'd love them to be a success, but I'm simply looking at what's happening.

As for numbers - in the last few weeks I've had direct contact with RU, football and even badminton lads who are interested in joining us for the summer.

And any team, if desperate, can find 'free' training facilities in the summer. They just need a decent field.

You make it sound like BARLA has to find its own funding and is not entitled to a share of the Sport England money - sorry but obtaining that responsibility lies with the RFL who bid for the community game. If the responsibility was still with BARLA I might agree with you - but it's not.

Check out the sports whole plan on the Sport England website - its not an RFL plan that Sport England are funding but a GAME plan....that includes the RFL, BARLA and whatever you yourself are in RL terms.

The 3 year programme you mention to increase participation - is that in Rugby League or all its derivitives and do players taking part in say winter AND summer count as two - like those currently playing in youth and university? Statistics are a wonderful tool for manipulating a picture. I struggle to see how will offering each NCL club short of £5K to switch to summer will increase participation?

I hope you are right about the RFL's lack of flexibility otherwise it seems a pretty one way street at the moment....no doubt the same offering will be made to those NCL clubs who decide to stay in winter under a BARLA banner - otherwise it might be suggested the money is simply being used as an enticement to switch and move away from an organisation.

So you've seen plenty of new clubs go to the wall - well not sure what the relevance of that statement is because the RFL have openly said that clubs who cannot switch are - well - expected casualties of the switch - is that the RFL being helpful?

I think a few more clubs will go to the wall before all this is settled, still with the right shaped calculator no doubt it will appear as a growth.

We are outside the heartlands and when I contacted BARLA originally to help start up a league they simply weren't interested and passed me to the RFL.

Since then I've had fantastic support from the full time staff at the RFL and we have a part time community coach who is generating more players than we can handle given our volunteer base. If we had been "given" the money by the RFL, we would have to have hired a community coach anyway, and figured out how to employ them, managed their time etc. Everyone at the club works for a living and we simply don't have enough free time.

Like Bury, we also have difficulties with facilities. Union clubs use you when they want money from you but aren't really interested and get aggressive if they see you as a threat. Councils have barely heard of rugby league and it takes a long time to persuade them to consider sports other than football, even though we have, in just 3 years, generated players who have represented England Community Lions, signed professional forms and signed on to academy and scholarship.

The money from Sport England has very specific objectives, and if we want to see anything like that money again, we have to do what SE, and ultimately the government, say. It looks like the funding post Olympics is going to be targeted at 16-19 year olds. We have to start gearing up for that now, so that we can present a credible case when competing against other sports who also have full time governing bodies.

Following on from what Tim has said, our club (Wigan Riversiders) took their first tentative steps in the league Tim created, which, as an alternative to the BARLA NWC was our only real option. We've gone from there to running 2 teams, 1 in the top tier in the NW, and have involved probably 100 players in the last 4 years as a result. Whilst we've all probably had our moments with RFL officials, having full time staff there to consult on matters pretty much all day every day has made getting to where we area fair bit easier.

Having to spoken to administrators at 2 of the biggest amateur clubs in Wigan in the last couple of weeks, I have been told that 'funding organisations' are being actively encouraged now to look favourably on summer clubs as opposed to winter ones. That's the dark side of the RFL. Regardless of whether this benefits my club, participation is participation regardless of affiliation and time of year.

there is a bit of stereotyping going on that some people are BARLA people, some RFL. What's critical is that we represent (and work for) the best interests of our clubs and our players. Frankly, I couldnt care who was administering support as long as it was good support. On that basis, the RFL have been far better for us than BARLA. That doesnt mean we accept everything the RFL say - i have a number of issues currently with the changes they are making and will continue having my arguments (e.g. I think they are setting the facilities standards for the bottom rung too high - it'll push clubs in development areas into partnership with RU because of the standards required and I think the organic development of an independent RL club should be encouraged more).

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?!

I suggest you read mmp's post carefully. And I'm not quite sure why you think the fact there have been hurdles make us look incapable - quite the opposite in fact: we've overcome those hurdles and found alternative solutions and are growing despite an utter lack of interest in most official quarters. Of course he explored pitch/training options before deciding to enter the NWC; to suggest otherwise is ridiculous. To be honest, if you think the word incapable defines by the huge steps we've taken and the leaps forward we're seeing right now, I also suggest you buy a dictionary.

mmp has established and grown the club - organically - from nothing. I'm sure in your wisdom you are fully capable of doing exactly the same thing more successfully in a borough with almost ZERO interest and barely any knowledge of Rugby League, and only a handful of players. If so, you're welcome to come down and show us how it's done.