Simon Taylor: Giving young rugby players something to play for

Earlston High School and Kelvinside Academy compete in the U18 Scottish Schools Plate at BT Murrayfield but a competitive league structure has not existed. Picture: SNS

If you are not directly involved with youth rugby, you may not know that this season has seen the SRU roll out their Schools and Youth Conferences.

The idea behind them is to provide a competitive, graded league structure for junior rugby across Scotland. But, perhaps more importantly, they are also designed to increase participation across the age grades within schools and clubs. Essentially, these are “whole school/club” competitions. So, as well as being awarded points in the usual way for winning matches, each of the five year groups, from S1 up to under 18, contributes to their school or club’s league standing simply by fielding a team each week.

Each conference contains schools/clubs of roughly similar rugby abilities, as well as comparable playing numbers. So some conferences will have schools who can field at least two teams at every age level, whilst in others the requirement is just one. It is worth taking a moment to look at the schools and youth section of the SRU website to get a handle on exactly how the system works. It seems slightly complicated at first glance, but after a couple of minutes navigating from conference to conference, even I got the drift. Still, it must have taken months of head-scratching by the SRU and the whole of the youth and schools rugby fraternity to boil things down into a workable framework, and then a massive effort by coaches, teachers and administrators on the ground to get the thing up and running.

No doubt there will have been teething problems in this first year, and I am aware there were, and possibly still are, objections from some quarters. I am not involved day to day with youth rugby so can’t really comment on the merits of the arguments for and against. I can only speak from what I know, and it seems to me that my own development would have been accelerated by having that extra edge of competition throughout my school years. All kids want to win but, in my day, with a fixture list of matches played in isolation, there was no real bigger picture to a season. Short of going undefeated for the year, or a cherished mention in the school magazine, overall goals were a little vague.