Rugby is trailing behind other sports in attracting youngsters
KEVIN FERRIE,
Chief Rugby Writer January 08 2009
No-one likes to be a party pooper but the Scottish Rugby Union's celebrations this week at having raised the number of youngsters playing the game by 10% somehow seemed a tad premature.

Getting more kids into any sport is undoubtedly a wonderful thing. However we are constantly told that the new SRU hierarchy relentlessly pursues value for money, in which context breaking the numbers down a little seems to raise a few issues.

"Since the Scottish Rugby development restructure in 2006, the total number of people playing rugby has risen by around 21% (from circa 24,200 to 30,500) while, importantly, the number of young people playing rugby has risen by about 24% (from circa 15,200 to 20,000)," their press release, based on performance following the organisation's restructuring in 2006, told us.


Yet of those 4800 youngsters some 2900 apparently took the sport up in 2007, whereas last year only 1900 were introduced.

Questioned further on that, the SRU's spokesman said the bigger rise in the first year had been down to the initial impact. Yet given what we are constantly, quite rightly, told by national and pro team coaches about tiny playing numbers being the key factor in the shortage of raw material available to them, is this not a bit soon for the law of diminishing returns to be kicking in? Indeed as those running development programmes hone their operations should there not be a significant year-on-year increase for a lengthy period?

Take, for example, the experience of cricket in this country immediately after Scotland started to get regular matches against county sides, thereby raising the game's profile.

According to figures produced by the European Cricket Council, rather than Cricket Scotland in-house statistics - albeit it was their press officer who passed them on to me - the overall playing numbers increased from 9649 in 2002 to 21,250 in 2006 and at youth level from 6200 to 13,800.

Never mind 10% or even 24% rises, according to my humble sums that's about 120% in both cases, surely the sort of percentage increases we might expect to see associated with a concerted effort being made when the initial base was so low.

That was achieved with a team of development officers that has now risen to around a dozen, some of them part-time. More up-to-date figures are not yet available, but Cricket Scotland is confident that in non-city areas in particular there has been a further surge in the past couple of years.

By contrast the SRU has a virtual army of Club Development Officers (CDOs), numbering 60 in all, supervised by eight Regional Development Officers. That has been built up over a period of around 20 years. Yet consider the playing numbers cited above alongside those issued by Scottish Hockey, where the total number of participants, admittedly estimated, is claimed to be 60,000 players aged eight to 16.

Consider, too, the profile of hockey in Scotland compared with that of rugby which may, like all other sports, suffer by comparison with football, but which nonetheless gets regular television exposure and is covered extensively in some newspapers.

Of course every regime distances itself from past activity, claiming it cannot be judged on what has happened before it took charge, so let us take that as read on behalf of the SRU, ignore the effectiveness or otherwise of the development programmes of the previous two decades and focus purely on this week's numbers.

Youth rugby is played on an age grade basis with players introduced as eight-year-olds and emerging at the other end as 18-year-old seniors which is, effectively, 10 different years.

Take the 1900 players who have taken up the sport in the past year, divide it by 60 CDOs and we get an average of around 31 new recruits per year. More than two full teams per CDO, Murrayfield's spokesman noted, except that of course it is not. What we have is an average of three players per age group per CDO, not even enough to fill a bench.

Apparently, in spite of the drop in increase with the previous year, this is sufficient to have them on course to achieve their strategic targets by 2011. Perhaps, then, we should be celebrating such sustained success.

Another way of looking at it, though, might be to ask that if this is sufficient to achieve targets then are those targets anywhere close to being as tough as we were told they were when they were published last year?

On the face of it, 60 CDOs ought to be more than enough to get to pretty much every youngster in Scotland and if so is it unreasonable to feel that the numbers should be rising a good deal faster than they are?

This article was posted on 8-Jan-2009, 08:21 by Hugh Barrow.