THE RUGBY RANT
Stephen Knight, a girls’ coach at Tetbur y, says cluster s ar e stunting the gr owth of rugby
“It’s misleading to say you have girls’ rugby when you’re joining with four other clubs”
T TETBURY, we’ve grown our girls’ section from the bottom up, we started with one age band and this season we’ll have two. Locally there are lots of other clubs and a new one has just popped up, Cotswold Lionesses, where five clubs (Cainscross, Cirencester, Cheltenham Tigers, Minchinhampton, Supermarine) have tried to put together one team.
What’s the long-term objective there? If one of those clubs produce half the players for those five that are clustered together, where do you go from there? Who do the players belong to? Which club has the identities, the memberships? It’s a minefield.
For me it’s misleading to say you have girls’ rugby when you’re joining together with four other clubs. It’s the RFU’s view as well that clusters don’t work because it stunts the growth of individual clubs. When you go further up the pyramid and into women’s rugby, you can’t enter certain competitions with clustered teams. Because what badge are you playing under?
I feel everyone wants to tick the box that they have girls’ rugby, but that’s almost become its Achilles heel. I’m a massive advocate of girls’ sport but you should try to grow it organically, not take shortcuts. For us to set up a girls’ team took three or four years’ planning and hard work to get to where we are.
From the teams we play that do cluster, there isn’t a cohesion – some of the players may have never seen each
Aother before. For our U14s we have a squad of 22 players and every week they see each other, their home is Tetbury rugby club, they’re united by the badge and there’s a sense of family.
The RFU have now changed the age bandings, which is a massive positive. Previously there was a jump from U15s up to U18s, a three-year age difference. There were three bands, now there are four. That will cause a few issues and for some clubs the easy answer is to cluster, but I don’t see where the growth is.
When you play fixtures, the RFU allow you to tailor it down to match numbers.
If Trowbridge, for example, come up to us with less than ten players, we can lend them players or match numbers. Their girls have made the effort, so let’s get a game on. If another team has eight players when it’s 12-a-side, we’ll lend players and each quarter I’ll rotate so that all of my players get to play for the opposition. Or we can have a really good eight-a-side game. Or I might have two teams of eight, so we’ll turn it into a round-robin tournament.
That’s a better way to go for me than clustering. Just being proactive and getting a game on.