Rugby Club Issue 75 | Page 45

East Dorset The youth section is vital for the clubs future. Our Coordinators, Howard Larkin and Chris Culleton, have the club packed with young players and their families on a Sunday. More importantly than the income it brings in is seeing the field full of rugby! We already have some ex youth lads in our senior side and are hopeful of a ‘conveyor belt’ of young talent filtering through. One of the main tasks at the moment is to form strong links and involvement between youth and seniors, and enforcing rugby discipline! With this healthy set up at the moment the future is very exciting for us. The plan is to keep growing the youth and mini numbers with hopefully links into more local schools. If our senior numbers could grow it would also be great to field two teams. This would help strengthen our bid to complete in Division 1. We have good links with Dorset & Wilts rugby and our local development officers from England RFU. We are soon going to refurbish and fix our floodlights to match standard to host evening fixtures – always popular evenings. Our first team will soon be wearing a new kit funded by Stuart Holt, owner of Holt Recruitment and some ‘number one’ shirts funded by the Thomas Tripp, a local pub run by Simon Wyatt-Budd. We are extremely grateful to these people as well as all volunteers who help out down the club. We try to maintain a grassroots ethos and traditions of rugby. Play hard, have a beer and occasionally burst into song. A great club, a great place to be. www.rugbyclubmag.com 45