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 working with partners to make that happen. Southampton had its first ‘taster’ session last week and 10 players took part supported by Dave Durston and Aaron Phipps from Pirates so a big thank you to them for helping get this off the ground. This Sunday will see the second session take place. The DMG also discussed the Super Series and representatives have gone back to their clubs with proposed dates for the first weekend of the tournament. This weekend sees two important events – Bulls celebrate their 10th anniversary so congratulations to them and the squad selected for the Prague tournament meet for a training weekend. Kirsty Clarke, Bev Everton and I visited Tedworth House in Wiltshire this week which is one of the new Help 4 Heroes military rehabilitation centres. We met with Martin Colclough, the head of the Battleback/H4H programme and discussed opportunities for delivering wheelchair rugby in the 4 rehabilitation units. Although there may not be large numbers of classifiable players from this area there is great interest and there will be some who we may be able to feed through to the clubs so again this is an area we will be focused on supporting.
David Pond
