Rugby club rebrands with new name
NP Rugby Club rebranded to Montgomery Bucks Rugby Football Club
The North Penn Rugby Club rebranded to the Montgomery Bucks Rugby Football Club earlier this month.
The rebrand has provided uniformity across all MBRFC age groups, demographics and teams. The six teams — youth, 13U, 15U, 19U boys, 19U girls and adult — are now all known as the Griffins.
Club President Jesse Richter coached the high school girls team 10 years ago. He and the high school boys coach at the time decided to rebrand their individual teams because players from outside of North Penn School District didn’t really want to wear
“North Penn Rugby” gear. The boys became the Iron Lions, the girls the Valkyries and the youth teams the Phoenix.
The Club started discussing a rebrand a couple years ago and started putting the plan into motion last year.
“Part of (the rebrand) is so to the outside world we look like a single club and people know who we are whether we’re recruiting for kids or adults,” Richter said, “Also within our club one of the things we recognized — we had a weekend workshop January of last year where we realized our club was stagnating a bit and we were year-after-year business as usual type stuff. We re
ally wanted to spend some time thinking about how do we really take our club to the next level and what does that look like? One of those key outputs was recognizing that our biggest asset is our people and we don’t do a good job taking advantage of club-wide resources because each team is its own silo. For example, when we run a fundraiser for one team, there’s no reason we can’t do it as a clubwide fundraiser except that we just aren’t structured to make that an easy thing to do. Parents that want to help out are just helping out with one team when they could, really without much more effort, be doing the same for all the teams.”
Richter credited both former President Stu Marjoram, whose father was a founding member in 1988, for starting the strategicplanning process that resulted in the rebrand and non-profit consultant Angela Speakman for helping MBRFC get where it is today.
Richter has been a part of the club since 1999. He participated as a player and coach before becoming President more than a year ago. He’s seen plenty of growth during his time, including the youth program being added in the mid 2000s and the U13 and U15 teams forming five years ago.
“We’ve done a lot to grow and expand,” he said. “That’s really our goal — how do we continue to expand our membership and reach that vision of sharing the love and joy of rugby that we have with as many people as possible in our community.”