Plans and New Jobs

Having presented our funding plans to UK Sport and Sport England we now have to wait until December for the decisions on what future funding we may have. That has not stopped us progressing our plans though and the last couple of weeks have been about getting moving in a number of key areas. As many of you will know we are now working with Roma Sports in Bridgend who are developing new chairs for us. The prototypes are out there being used and refined and we will be in a position to purchase some more soon so that we can get new chairs into those clubs who are struggling to meet the demands of the new post London interest. London has helped to provide some spare chairs but I hope to have fou...
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More Support For Clubs

The end of October is always an opportunity for us to take stock. By then we have all of our financial data for the six months - April to September so we can see if we are keeping to our budget; and we are also able to review progress against what we said we would do in our business plan and see how we are getting on. This week I sat down with Kirsty Clarke and Bev Everton and we spent a day on this. We agreed that a lot of what we said we would do this year has been achieved already but as you would expect there is still much more to do in the second part of the year. We have prioritised this work and I have been able to  put some additional money into giving more support to our clubs. ...
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Exciting Times for Bulls and Hawks

It has been a good week. It started last weekend with the North East Bulls who  celebrated their 10th Anniversary in style with a regional tournament. The North East Bulls took the final on Sunday beating the Dragons narrowly by 39-36 in a competition that also saw the Caledonian Crushers in only their second competitive outing. It is really excellent to see that regional tournament taking place and to see Crushers really developing as a new club so well done and congratulations to all teams and to Bulls on their anniversary. At the other end of the country I was able to join the Hawks in Plymouth for their Monday night training session. It was fantastic to see 9 new players and to experi...
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Clubs Agree New League Divisions

A big thank you to Sport Nottinghamshire and Simon Starr for hosting this week's meeting of the Domestic Management Group. The group made up of the club representatives discussed a number of items all about making sure the game lives up to what players want. An important decision taken at this week's meeting was to create two divisions for the league in recognition of the growth of new clubs: Division 1 : Crash A; Storm; Crusaders; Mauraders; Pirates; Warriors Division 2: Crash B; Dragons; Bulls; Crushers; Hawks It is great news that we now have enough clubs for two leagues and even better news that there is still more interest for new clubs in other parts of the country and we are work...
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Team Announced for Prague

Another great sign of the future was the Performance Management Group sitting down this week to select the team to take part in the Prague Tournament in November - see the announcement below. Coaches Tez Shaw and Justin Frishberg gave excellent presentations to the selectors and it was great to hear that there is so much new talent coming through. All of the athletes selected for the tournament are also being considered as potential athletes for the Rio cycle, so there is much for them to play for in Prague as we work with UK Sport to agree our next group of athletes to place on the World Class Performance Programme. This week I also met with the Chief Executive of Harlequins Rugby Club a...
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Still high levels of interest

It is now three weeks since the end of the Paralympics but we are still getting lots of emails and calls from people interested in getting involved with the sport. Three potential new players have been sign posted to Marauders and the interest in Southampton has been sufficient for us to work with the agencies in the area to arrange for  6 'taster sessions' to be delivered in Totton. There is also a huge amount of interest in Suffolk and Woodbridge Rugby Club is acting as the catalyst for bringing all of this together and we intend to get something going out of there as quickly as possible so that we can let people try out the game. This builds on our strategy of working more closely wi...
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