The Club is implementing a recruitment campaign with three primary targets:
1) Youth players
2) Girls
3) Adults over 18 who have never played rugby before
Specifically, we are targeting boys and girls from non-rugby playing schools from all sections of the community. Our mini and youth sections currently have players regularly attending from an incredible 47 local schools and we are looking to maintain this and expand it further.
The Club is also currently working on reviving the ladies/girls section and we are focusing to recruit girls 12 – 18 years of age for both tag and contact rugby. Training for U18 girls is on Monday night from 7.00pm – 8.15pm and our objective is to develop teams at U15 and U18 level.
For adult over 18 players, we want to target guys who stopped playing rugby after leaving school and to encourage them to take the game up again at a social level.
Our primary target, however, are those guys with no experience of rugby at all and specifically from the non-traditional rugby community who want to try their hand at rugby for the first time.
The final area we are keen to target are young men from the ethnic communities living and working in the Armagh area from countries such as Poland, Lithuania etc. We have produced posters in several foreign languages specifically to get our message across.
How are we going to do all this?
Mark Riddell is our Club Community Rugby Officer and he will be playing a key role.
Mark will be arranging ‘beginner’ sessions for those people with no experience of rugby at all and everyone will be made most welcome to come down to the Club for the first time.
Youth players will be directed to Wednesday night training applicable to their age group and the appropriate youth coaching staff will accommodate new recruits accordingly. Similarly, girls will be directed to the Monday night training sessions.
For further information: Contact PRO Ken Redpath t: 07825 747772
