Rugby league’s leading professional players return to action this weekend when the new Super League season begins. But there is perhaps a much more important return-to-play process taking place elsewhere in the sport, beneath the glaring eyes of first-team level. League, like so many other sports, was hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic – something to which those tasked with developing the stars of the future can attest.
While Super League successfully completed its domestic calendar last summer, the sport’s academy and scholarship players have spent an entire year in the wilderness, on hiatus because of restrictions surrounding competitive activity. No training sessions, let alone games to play. A year of development lost and the impact, while not immediately concerning, could be damaging in the years ahead.
“This isn’t something we’re going to feel now, or even next year,” Wigan’s head of youth, Darrell Goulding, says. Rugby league has fallen behind sports it typically competes with in terms of junior development, largely because junior sport had long since resumed last year in sports such as football and cricket.
League was only able to restart its academy and scholarship programmes properly this month and even in towns such as Wigan and Wakefield, where rugby league is dominant, the damage has been significant. “We’ve a couple of kids on professional deals who’ve decided they’re going to go and focus on other sports, because they can play them,” Wakefield’s head of youth, Mark Applegarth, concedes.
“We’re fishing out of a smaller talent pool all the time, and there are kids who’ve not played for a year and will now decide their new interests are more important than rugby league. I’ll notice immediately how hard this is going to hit us, when I’m trying to sign kids for the future. But the sport won’t see it until the medium term, when there’s fewer players coming through.”
Goulding says: “I do worry that some kids will walk away from the game because they’ll feel like they’ve fallen too far behind without a year of developing, or because they’ve got into other habits. That’s big for a sport that already has a smaller number of talent to pick from than other sports. We’ll lose some players of the future from this, for sure.”
Many within the sport agree the true impact of this year-long hiatus will not be seen for some time. “We’ll undoubtedly let people, but we have to hope it’s the kids who would have naturally fallen away anyway,” the former Great Britain prop Paul Anderson, who is now Warrington’s academy coach, says. “We won’t know for a few years, so we’re holding our breath.”
Clubs have done whatever they can to keep their young players engaged on Zoom but there are also concerns about their mental wellbeing, on top of their stunted physical development. “Teenage kids are used to playing sport every day at school and then coming in here four times a week to train,” Goulding says. “It’s their life, and they’ve had that taken from them. We’re obviously going to try and play catch-up with developing them as players, but as people we have to be mindful of the mental impact this has had on them.”
Because of lack of community rugby league over the past year many clubs are yet to fill their quota of scholarship intake of players aged 16 and younger, which often identifies the stars of the future. Applegarth says: “Kids who are 12 or 13 got probably two games of rugby last year, so we were going off data that was already a year old for some who we signed. In a late-development sport, that formula just doesn’t stack up but we really had no choice. We’re going to have to wait until local clubs restart, and while we’ll help them do that it just means we’re falling further behind.”
There will be no formal academy competition, which covers those aged between 16 and 19, this year, with clubs playing ad hoc friendlies throughout 2021 as the sport aims to play catch-up. But that lack of competitive action does not worry people such as Goulding, who insists the priority for rugby league in 2021 is to focus on development not results.
“I think it’s the sensible approach,” he says. “I just want my kids playing games, because they’ve fallen behind in terms of the development we want to get into them. If we’re lucky, and we do our job, we might be able to pull this back. But I do think there’ll be a knock-on, and there might be less players going through to the first team in the next few years. The scary thing for us is, we just don’t know yet – and we won’t for a while. So we watch, and we wait.”