This weekend a new Super Series begins with Division 1 teams lining up at Fenton Manor in Stoke on Trent. This great tournament goes from strength to strength with the quality of play increasing year on year. This is good for the game itself and also for the future of our national side. Lorraine and Head Coach Paul Shaw will be dropping into Stoke over the weekend to look at players and talk with club coaches and Leagues 2 and 3 will see Talent Head Coach Phil Zealy around when their league starts. The number of teams in the competition continues to grow with 17 competing across 3 leagues this year – 8 in Division 1, 6 in Division 2 and 3 in Division 3. This is fantastic growth as the league had just 7 teams competing 4 years ago. Our work to continue this growth continues and we think that we still have a long way to go to find new players for existing teams and to develop the game in new areas. Ongoing development work is critical as we roll the game out to more people and provide more opportunities for those who want to play, officiate and support the game.
This week wheelchair rugby reached the far south west where I live. Kirsty and her team ventured down there a couple of months ago and laid the foundations for some great work by Chris Perkins, the Plymouth Hawks coach who last night started to deliver sessions at Truro College in Cornwall. We have been able to support this development with loan chairs funded from our Sport England grant. Chris will be delivering sessions every Thursday between 6.30-7.30pm at Truro.10 players turned up for the first session last night which is a great start. Next week Chris will be at the Ability Games for Schools in Barnstaple, where over 80 children have signed on for Wheelchair rugby, the most popular sport on the day! We are also really excited about the development of our newest club the Dorset Destroyers. The taster sessions in Dorset have been really successful and 10 new players are regularly playing the game . A big thank you to the many, many volunteers who support Kirsty and the RDOs to deliver these programmes and help create these new clubs.
This morning I met with Martyn Salt our Event Director for the World Wheelchair Rugby Challenge. Progress towards the event remains on track and watch this space for the announcement of the tournament schedule which will be out by the end of the month. Many of you will have seen the fantastic piece on WWRC15 that we managed to get into the November edition of Front Row, the Rugby World Cup’s electronic newsletter which goes out to over a million subscribers. The WWRC15 website saw a huge spike in people registering for news and ticket information following the release of Front Row and our confidence grows that we can sell out the event. Make sure you and your friends and family register on the site if you want to be first in line for tickets which will become hot properties!
This past week we also saw the announcement of the Talent team to play in the Prague tournament in December. Coaches Phil Zealey and Ross Morrison have selected 10 for the squad and they will now have an intensive period of camps as they enter the final phase of preparation at Loughborough.
That’s all from me now. Good luck to all teams who start their Super Series campaign this weekend. Also good luck to our Ambassador Mike Brown who is part of the England team taking on the All Blacks at Twickenham on Saturday.
David Pond
