Rugby Club Issue 89 | Page 32

aberdare FOLLOW US ONLINE TWITTER.COM/RUGBYCLUBMAG Rugby Club Magazine recently caught up with Rob Lewis an ex player and long-standing supporter and sponsor of Aberdare RFC with his business WD Lewis who told us, ““I suppose I’ve been involved from playing school rugby with my friends, we naturally progressed to our local rugby club when I was 16 years old. My main playing position was scrum half and I played up until injury took its toll. After a few years away from playing I returned to enjoy more social Rugby. Over the years I have been involved with our mini junior section, an area where thankfully the club is holding its own. The weather has caused a lot of disruptions this season and competing in a league where many clubs are strong defensively it is going to certainly offer us challenges on the journey and in our ambition to win the league. Although we have won all our games to date some of those have been quite close encounters however when the lads are on their game I can’t see many teams beating us. My son Daniel is still club captain and enjoying the great team spirit which he believes will take them to new heights this season! Our new head coach has built on our previous team and we now have half a dozen key players, in the forwards and backs, who are rising to the challenge leaving us with a very exciting squad. I have to say that the moral of our boys is excellent and the mood has still remained high even in the tougher fixtures we have played in. I can only urge everyone at Aberdare RFC for more of the same positive attitude as we enter our final matches and with everyone behind the squad we have a great chance of making 2019/2020 season a historic one!” Rugby Club Magazine caught up with club Captain Daniel Lewis who has been with the club since his junior rugby days. He told us, “We have a really good blend of older and younger players which seems to be giving us an edge this season. Since we last spoke a few seasons back the team has certainly matured and grown together. I’m not certain but I think if we win the league we would then make club history by being promoted to our highest ever league. As club captain this would be a great recognition of our team and of course the commitment they continue to show. With great backs and an ambitious group of forwards we can be a hard team to beat and we have also got accustomed to grinding a win out when we have to. I would just ask the team to pick up from where we have left off and if we show the same level of commitment for each other then the title is firmly in our own hands! Best wishes to everyone for the remainder of the season!” occasions which is usually the way it goes when you’re winning. It is important to say that the previous coaching group also did a very good job and we’ve got an exciting group of young players here now who have come through our youth section.” now with a very young first team. We believe that that is the right way to go and will continue to focus on this area in the coming years with the hope that more young players will continue to come through the ranks.” Youth 2020 “Mark Stephens heads up the youth section here at the club and they have done a fantastic job of bringing young players through. We have had teams running for at least ten years from U7s to U16s and are starting to see the benefits of that “The obvious aim for the rest of this season is to try and win promotion. We’ve put ourselves in a fantastic position to get promotion to Division 1. We certainly feel as a club that we have the personnel to take us into that league and 32 Issue 89 then be competitive when we get there. We’ve built the strength in depth at the club so it would be disappointing now if we are not able to get promoted. There’s a long way to go and we know how difficult it will be but promotion is what we are targeting. The league above is a little more physical so it will be important to cope with that but we are confident in our players ability to do so.” Challenges “The biggest challenges over the next five years will always