Editor’s Note: We at LWOS are always looking to add passionate sports fans to our writing team. We are very excited to introduce Chris Callaway, Chairman of the Saxons Sevens which runs both men and women’s squads. Chris has a passion for Seven’s, Womens Rugby, Club Development and Injury Prevention. Welcome to the #LastWordArmy!
During the course of my involvement with rugby, my life has seen me play for four different clubs and I have had the pleasure of coaching at two of them, plus one other. The fortunes of each of those five clubs could not have been more different, and yet hidden beneath the layers of the ups and downs of each of them is the same root of rot. Forgive me while I try to elaborate on the clubs and their fortunes.
The first was Folkestone, once a struggling club that was surviving their move out of the path of the Channel Tunnel enabled them to acquire new premises and to a certain degree rebuild a new future. Their successes on the pitch have never seen them move beyond a two or three league rise and fall every couple of season. The club has never been able to find the capital resources to push beyond their reality. They are however stable enough.
The second was Wasps. Always at the top of the game and one of the privileged few to have never fallen out of the Premiership and most would assume that their successes on the pitch should have been matched by financial stability off the pitch. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The club has been through multiple owners since they first voted in the sale of the club in 1996. I know because I voted, I remember the speeches of why we should do it and to be fair if the measure is how well the team have performed on the pitch then they are up there. But given that they were weeks away from extinction at the end of the 2012 season, the club has bounced from one owner to the next, struggling for a solid base to grow from and crippled by the lack of ownership of their own grounds. Mismanagement could not have been truer; especially considering their last owner is now in prison for fraud.
Then there was Richmond, and again I was there in that tumultuous season that ended with them being thrown out of the league. But not for a certain few individuals this club would have become extinct. It has gone about climbing the leagues slowly and is now back on the brink of professionalism and certainly the model the used to get there really benefitted from the business model that was implemented. But to be fair most clubs don’t have the capable, quality staffing resources to achieve what they did, and even fewer can claim to be one of the first 2 clubs ever in rugby, so they do have a little bit of heritage on their side.
Sevenoaks were the fourth and out of all the clubs that I have been involved with they seem to be the one that has excelled at standing still. The playing personnel has changed over time but the club has gone neither forwards nor backwards. There have been changes but in this writer’s opinion most of the driving ideas behind the changed were misguided and the club is full of what can only be described as missed opportunities.
Finally there is my current club Old Mid Whitgiftians, a club that was once riding off the coat tails of a golden generation, punched massively above it weight. Now it finds itself struggling for survival at it’s current level and at risk of sinking further back down the leagues. Whilst at previous clubs, they talk of getting the younger generation involved in the running of the club it is normally aimed at getting the over 40s to become the next leaders of the club, ready to take over from the over 60s. Not at Old Mids, half of the current board is under 30, match day meals away at opposition clubs never involves more than three ‘committee’ members and rarely does more than one attend. The club barely has more than 50 members in total. Just breaking even each year is an achievement.
The reality of most clubs today has been dictated by the commercial need to survive and everything that entails to get a team out every week. But the reality in the world of universal promotion and relegation within English rugby there are certain human traits that will forever come into play and put simply they are both pride and ego. The pride bit is simple enough to explain, nobody wants to be the Chairman or Coach that took the club down through the leagues. And the ego bit is even easier to explain because everybody wants to be the one who took their club to their greatest success. With no measures in place club chairman and keen to massage their egos by bringing a level of investment that enables them to buy a better quality of player to help them progress through the leagues, everybody from Barking to Newbury has done this and the results have seen them rise and fall twice as hard every time and they just can’t help themselves from repeating the same mistakes again and again.
When the game was announced as now being professional in 1995 the RFU have almost stood still and generally been the last to respond to the disaster they created at the time. The have almost become disinterested in actually governing the sport properly with almost all their power devolved to the counties, so when change is needed they are never able to drive it through. Right now the lower levels of English rugby are crying out for governance, a set of rules and practices that are enforced. Every time I attend an RFU town hall meeting the same questions get asked and the RFU manage to brush it off every time without actually responding to that fact that their is genuine concern. Clubs want a level playing field, they want to know going into the next season that they have done everything they can to survive, let alone thrive in the next league season, but how do you do that at the lower levels when you have no idea whether the other clubs aren’t pushing themselves to the point of bankruptcy to win the league by buying in better players. There seems to be a mantra that if you don’t pay you will only head one way.
My first season as head coach of Old Mids has been a challenging one because we have no resources, I am not even paid for the time I put in and I am now, qualifications wise, where I should be paid. When I arrived at the club I was told I would be lucky to get more than 8 people turn up to training once a week and that I shouldn’t try anything too complicated. Well over the last month I have had to reassess how I define my successes because if I didn’t I was going to go mad. Bringing with me practices learned from coaches at national league level (I coached at Richmond at National 2 when they won promotion to National 1) combined with some very interesting talks and ideas I have picked up along the way including some of the more influential ideas I have picked up from meeting the likes of Sir Graham Henry. I now have 25 people training on a Thursday and 15 on a Tuesday. The players feel engage for the most part and they have bought into the ideas that I have sown. We play ambitious rugby that all of our players enjoy (when it goes well), and we have started to find that we are creating a bit of a buzz with some of our older but not yet retired players who have started to creep out of the wood works and started to ask if they could play.
Are we a club going in the right direction, far from it. I know at least four of the clubs in our league that are playing players that to be honest are no more better than mine. But when you starting paying players you get a different kind of commitment from them and you can enforce certain behaviours on them, which you just can’t do to amateur players who are actually paying for the privilege of turning out each week for your club. Until the RFU decides to draft up guidelines governing how much clubs can spend on players, they are failing in the fundamental duty to protect and safeguard the future of the game from the evils that ego and pride bring with them in such an ungoverned environment.
What does they future hold for my beloved sport. I don’t know but I just don’t think the game is thriving in the way the RFU would have you believe, we are struggling just to survive.
Thanks for reading, you can follow me on Twitter @TheSaxonsCoach; as well as our fellow LWOS rugby writers – @lastwordkyle, @richfergie, @LWOSPerrineR and @Daniel_Ford_1. Give the site a follow while you’re at it – @lastwordonsport and please take a moment to like our Facebook Page.
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Main Photo Credit: Clay Cross via Flickr
