Thirty years on from the high-profile switch, Super League is celebrating the anniversary with a round of fixtures that pay homage to its opening weekend.<\/p>\n
Leeds and Warrington will meet at Headingley on Sunday, 29 March, just as they did to help kick off the Super League era back in the mid-nineties.<\/p>\n
It was a culture shock for the players initially, though, given the speed at which the changes were introduced.<\/p>\n
The 1995-96 season, shortened with a view to the forthcoming mayhem of the new league, had barely finished when preparations got under way for that historic first campaign.<\/p>\n
For then 19-year-old Harris, the chance to play rugby league professionally and forge a career in the sport was an opportunity he could have scarcely believed possible just years before.<\/p>\n
“It was something I was lucky enough to be part of and to play in that very first game for Warrington against Leeds,” Harris continued.<\/p>\n
“It was at Headingley, the Rhinos had just been bought by Paul Caddick and Gary Hetherington and they were becoming a very strong side and it was a special time.<\/p>\n
“It was a huge change going from a game that was two or three nights a week training with a match on the weekend, conservative contracts with guys who were working jobs alongside that, to suddenly we walk through the door on a Monday morning and 25 guys that were all on a full-time programme.<\/p>\n
“It was a huge transition for the game and from that the sport evolved very, very quickly; it got faster, players became more athletic as they had more time to work physically.<\/p>\n
“We’re seeing the benefits of that 30 years later, with the supreme athletes that we have now, and that comes from decades of full-time professionalism.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thirty years on from the high-profile switch, Super League is celebrating the anniversary with a round of fixtures…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":496566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-497643","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-rugby","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/496566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}