AROUND THE REGION - Pembrokeshire Rugby

Mr Lee91 wrote:

The playing numbers are a total farce!

There’s consistently around 30,000, 6-19 year olds (13 years) playing the game but when it comes to seniors 18-35+ (17+years) there’s less than 15,000 which is well below a 50% drop from m&j to seniors.

Yes there’s some mitigating factors such as work and family commitments but that doesn’t count for the full loss.

There is no transition anywhere in the game, you spend your entire M&J playing with and against the same players in your school year.

Then you go from playing every week at U16 to struggling for a game for 2 years at youth and then even worse at seniors.

It’s no wonder players leave the game when they’re not playing.

I’m not claiming to know all and have all the answers to these problems.

There are things that can be done like setting up Friday or Sunday leagues. If they’re serious about keeping youth under 18 then look at an U21’s and maybe an U25’s would be a better solution to keep people playing and more importantly playing for their local.

But kids play a lot more sport than adults. The truth is most kids will play at least 3 or 4 sports and then when they become older they’ll decide which one or two they prefer and stick to that (with a

lot of adults doing no sports let’s not forget). Rugby is also a very physical sport and so a lot of people will decide they prefer to play something easier / safer. Most people also have kids e.t.c which again makes it harder to keep up the numbers from junior to first / second team rugby.

Therefore comparing against other countries is a much better metric (although still needing a lot of caveats) than junior numbers. As it happens I don’t even think retaining ~40% of junior players is even that bad. None of this is to say that the WRU have done a good job, or that there is nothing more that they and the clubs can do; just that the metric you used to measure their success was IMO a bad one.