Yorkshire gridiron clubs are open to all shapes and sizes
Ben McKenna continues his series of sports in the Broad Acres with a look at the increasingly popular American football scene.
AMERICAN FOOTBALL is becoming an increasinglypopular sport on these shores with its origins in Yorkshire dating as far back as the 1980s.
The sport has seen a surge in playing numbers in the last decade, with the NFL bringing more regular-season games to the United Kingdom and TV audience numbers increasing, with the 2019 Super Bowl reaching a peak of 1.3 million viewers in Britain.
The Yorkshire Rams have been representing the White Rose county in the sport in Britain since 1986 and are one of the oldest gridiron teams in the UK.
They play in the second tier of the British game with Doncaster Mustangs, founded in 2002, also playing at the same level while Sheffield Giants, formed in 2008, compete in the top tier.
The Rams were founded as the Wakefield Wasps in 1986 before moving to Huddersfield a year later and re-branding as the Huddersfield Rams.
The club became known as the Yorkshire Rams in the early 1990s and moved to their current home at the South Leeds Stadium in 2016.
Head coach Jason Shaw was set to take charge of his first full season in 2020 before all competitive matches were cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak. The club has a flag football team, which is a noncontact version of the sport, and has junior teams that can take players all the way through to the senior side.
“We are now part of the Yorkshire Academy of American
Football which is based out of Leeds Beckett University,” said Shaw.
“That incorporates a flag team which runs from eight years old up until 13 and we have got two youth contact teams, an Under17s team and Under-19s team.
“Then we have got the Rams as the adult team, so we have got provision to take youngsters right the way through until they decide they are too old to play the game any more.”
The British American Football season normally runs during the summer months with 10 regularseason matches followed by a play-off series.
Shaw added: “We saw a big spike in recruitment this year, we took on eight or nine guys who had not played the game before.
“A lot of that has come from the fact there are more games on Sky Sports now and more people are watching.
“The way we sell it when we are advertising for our rookie days is that there is a position for every body type in American football. You don’t even need to catch the ball.
“There are some positions where it is your job to block or sack the quarterback. There are big guys, small guys, quick guys and slow guys. There really is a position for everybody.”
Shaw’s attraction to the sport comes from producing the chess-like tactics and plays to witnessing the all-action matches.
He added: “For me, it has got both parts of what I look for in sport.
“Tactically, it is kind of like a chess match and then when you get into the game, between the whistles, it is just fierce.
“There is no jogging around. When that whistle goes, it is 100 per cent intensity.”