mmp wrote:
That's a reassuring post. I spoke with a NCL secretary yesterday and they were keen on the A team format being seperate because they saw it as a way of recruiting to the A team as they felt players had a tendency to go off to other first teams instead. I'd still hope that your A sides came to summer and the competition itself became stronger overall with a few top end NWC sides making the move.
That is exactly the mentality that we are trying to avoid. Our A team was our NWC 1st team and we had ambitions of getting them into the NWC Premier as this would lessen the gap between the NCL team and NWC team - and the results of this have been seen on the field with the NCL Team. We don't want to recruit players to play soley for our A team, we want them to be able to make the step up to play in the NCL team too - this is reflected in the fact that we have just appointed the BARLA GB Assistant Coach as Head Coach of our A Team. We have a real fear that all the hard work in moving up the league could be destoryed if we end up playing only 3 or 4 competitive games per season and is something we will strive to avoid at all costs.
The only problem having a second team of this standard is that it means there aren't the playing opportunities for some of the lads who come down and aren't the best players or lads that come through the youth set-up that struggle to make the jump up to the high standard straight away. That is why we tried to get a third team off the ground last year and is something that we will certainly be looking to establish more sucessfully in the future.
