These are exciting times for Chester RUFC. The first team are on course for promotion after a scintillating start to the season while plans are in place to transform the club into the ‘Crewe Alexandra of rugby.’ PAUL WHEELOCK reports
CREWE Alexandra are famed in the football world for consistently producing players who go on to play at the highest levels of the domestic game.
While not on the same scale, Chester RUFC have enjoyed similar success in recent years.
Ben Foden is an established England international and Premiership star with Northampton Saints, his brother Tom is back playing at the club after a stint in the Championship, while one of Tom’s current team-mates, Lloyd Hayes, is ready to make the move to the bigger stage.
But ambitious plans mean there is real hope at Hare Lane that the club can truly become a ‘conveyor belt’ of talent to mirror Crewe.
Nic Corrigan, who has guided the first team to the top of National League Three North in his debut season as Chester’s head coach, said: “The firsts are the output of everything we do and I genuinely believe we can be competitive in level four of English rugby if we are promoted.
“And in five years time, with the right facilities, infrastructure and people, I see no reason why we cannot be a National One team, playing at the third highest level.
“That has to come with everybody’s agreement and if it comes to pass that we settle at level four or come back to level five, that’s fine as the main thing for me is that Chester becomes recognised as the Crewe Alexandra of rugby.
“By that I mean a stable feeder club, for the likes of Sale Sharks, and a conveyor belt of young players who are good members of society and who play hard, physical but fair rugby.
“If we can do that, I don’t think there’ll be a better badge to have.”
Corrigan is spearheading a coach development programme that will be fundamental in helping achieve the club’s aims. He hopes the programme will improve both the club’s volunteer coaches and the 300 players registered to its minis and junior section.
Corrigan said: “As part of the 2015 Rugby World Cup in England the RFU want to develop 2,015 Level Two coaches.
“We’ve said to the RFU that we’re going to produce 40 of them and, thanks to a private sponsor we’re going to get them out there.
“It will help give our young players a better rugby experience and it is good payback for some of the volunteers, who are our lifeblood.”
The club has also created an academy which will see rising stars attend sessions, run in three eight-week blocks throughout the year, at the University of Chester.
The target of the academy, according to Corrigan, will be to make the players more ‘educated around strength and conditioning, around lifestyle and nutrition, and around the academic choices they make with their rugby careers in mind’.
The club are building a close relationship with the university. The first team will train there two nights a week from next season, while students from the university are helping to enhance the club’s profile by running its social media sites.
If Corrigan believes the club’s greatest strength is its numbers, then he reasons its greatest weakness, sitting ‘behind pretty trees in Hare Lane’ in Littleton, is that ‘people don’t necessarily know where we are in terms of the city’.
That is why the club is engaging with city-centre institutions like the university and why it has successfully applied to become one of the RFU’s first O2 Touch Rugby Centres, which is helping attract players of all ages and abilities to the sport.
It is a fine balancing act for Corrigan and the Chester committee, keeping their eyes on the wider picture while at the same time preparing for the possibility of the first team’s promotion to National League North Two.
Corrigan said: “We are planning for promotion with the lads and we will consult them all the way.
“We are moving to increase our training load and the lads will get greater support for this, which doesn’t necessarily mean money because we have to live within our means.
“Our relationship with the university will help us with this. For example, we’ll be able to use their artificial surface when the weather is iffy.
“We are all focused on the same goal. Proof of that is the fact the lads this season have paid for their own hotel accommodation before games they wanted to travel to the night before.
“They will continue to do that next season, if we are promoted, as we’ll be going down far south as Luton and as far north as Darlington.”
Chester, whose last two matches have been postponed, are at home on Saturday against Waterloo (2.15pm).
England’s Six Nations Championship opener against Scotland (4pm) will be shown afterwards in the main bar.
