Southland District Rugby League says it has grown its playing numbers by 24% in the past 12 months.
Southland District Rugby League has seen significant growth in its junior playing numbers, and being creative with its calendar is helping to achieve that.
SDRL development officer Dominic Vercoe said there has been a 24% increase in participation in the past 12 months, going from about 700 to 923 as of this month.
Vercoe said the key quest has been finding ways to allow kids to play both rugby union and rugby league, rather than taking on rugby union in a tug of war over players.
It has included this year’s introduction of Wednesday night junior rugby league competitions, with those games played under lights at Rugby Park.
“We’ve always had kids that maybe wanted to play league, but they haven’t been able to play league,” Vercoe told The Roar Podcast.
“The beauty of the Wednesday night thing is that the kids can play rugby as well.”
“You just have to be creative… and if that’s by introducing a Wednesday night comp – which is pretty much entry level – that’s how we get our new kids into it, and it’s working for us.”
Vercoe said the Wednesday night competition was a work in progress, and it hadn’t 100% hit the mark this year, but he added it was a pilot season, and it would be back better next year.
While rugby league is attempting to work its way around the rugby union calendar to get kids playing both, Vercoe was mindful that a lot was being asked of some of the teenagers that play both sports at a decent level.
As an example, he pointed to those that played rugby union in the Southland Boys’ High School first XV, which is an intense programme, while also being included in Southland rugby league rep squads.
He said about six or seven fell into that bracket.
“If you want to be playing rugby league and rugby union, should you be going to every single training and every single game every week is a big question that I ask myself.”
As a result, SDRL has opted to hold one weekly training session on a Sunday for its age-group representative squads – knowing most of those players were already getting a lot of fitness and conditioning work elsewhere.
At a senior level, SDRL has also made tweaks to its calendar to allow players to play both rugby league and rugby union.
The sport has a summer senior competition that finishes before the start of the rugby union club season.
However, that has proved problematic for the Southland Rams’ preparations given the large gap between the summer club league competition and the senior representative season later in the year.
This year SDRL will launch a short four-week, four-team club competition that will start on August 1 after the finish of the rugby union season.
That senior club competition will run through to August 22 and from there the Southland Rams squad will be selected.
“If you don’t get a club competition right before your rep competition, you’ve got some players that are severely underdone,” Vercoe said.
“There were a lot of conversations around how we make this work because rugby is a stronghold here; you can’t just drop a league comp at the end of a rugby season [during the finals].”
“For me, I just felt like we had to get a shoulder season before our rep window to be able to pick the Rams. You’ve got a clear pathway for the Rams.”
“It’s also a community piece. It’s another time for our league community to get behind our clubs before they then go on to the rep fixtures.”