Primary School Tag Rugby Festival

This season the NLD Youth Council has been rejuvenated with 11 young volunteers aged (16 to 23) joining from across Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Derbyshire. They have been working to set up events and develop an online presence to support young players, officials and volunteers.

On Wednesday the 8th of March, Lottie Dack, a member of the NLD Youth Council ran a primary schools’ tag rugby festival for years 5 and 6 in the Spalding area to promote youth rugby amongst under 12s. Lottie is a Year 13 student studying  ‘A Levels’ at Spalding Grammar School. She also plays rugby at Boston RUFC. She showed great initiative, planning and resilience in bringing this project together. The NLD Youth Councillors will be seeking opportunities to support young people set up similar festivals next season.

With the generous help from the Spalding Grammar School’s Year 12 Sports Leaders led by Head of PE Chris Crane and the support of Spalding Rugby Club the day proved to be a great success.  The primary schools that attended were Moulton Chapel, Fleet Wood Lane, Tydd St Mary and Sutton St James.

The morning consisted of coaching by the Sports Leaders, so the children were able to learn about defensive lines, ball handling and other important rugby basics.  Later came lunch, where Spalding Rugby Club provided an array of delicious sandwiches, crisps and fruit to make sure the players were all fuelled up to play in the tournament in the afternoon.

After lunch, the festival began.  Despite the cold and windy conditions, the event saw lots of budding young rugby players able to show off the skills that they had learnt in the morning.  Following some amazing defending, running and try scoring we had our awards ceremony run by Bryony Field of Loughborough Lightning.   All the schools received a trophy and all the students went away with a medal to help them remember the great day of rugby.

The festival’s goal was to open the world of rugby up to young players and give them an opportunity to learn something new or improve their abilities if they already had a background to rugby.  Representatives from both Spalding Rugby Club and Boston Rugby Club including women and girls’ coach Shaun Turl and girls coach Emma Fletcher helped make the day and reinforce local club links.