The St. Albert Rugby Football Club made the decision last week to fold its third division men’s team that played in the Edmonton Rugby Union.
Club president Matt Herod said low membership was the reason for the decision.
“We knew this was coming,’ Herod says. “We were just hoping our membership, our playing membership, was going to increase, unfortunately it didn’t so we had to take a look at what was best for the club and best for our players.”
The club usually has 80-90 registered playing members and this year membership is at 60. In the past five years, the club has always been able to field three teams.
Herod says the drop in membership meant the club would have had to ask players to play two games in one day for a couple of times throughout the season and it would have been asking too much of members. They decided to reduce the number of teams instead.
“We want to be an elite club so we wanted to keep our first division team,” Herod says. “But to have a proper feeder system we wanted to keep our second division as well.”
Herod says his first thought was that membership was down because of the fields. Excavation began on St. Albert rugby fields last August and Herod anticipates that they won’t be ready for play until June 2014 at the earliest.
“You’re asking a lot out of your playing membership to pay full memberships, travel for every game, travel for all your practices,” Herod says. “There was really no club and no home team advantage for us at all.”
After looking at the situation in other rugby organizations, Herod said he noticed St. Albert wasn’t the only club experiencing reduced membership.
“Talking to other clubs and looking at other clubs’ numbers, a lot of clubs are in the same boat where they’re just lacking numbers,” Herod says. “The Druids, for example, pulled out their third div team right before the season started and a lot of their players went to the Sharks in Parkland, and they were only running two teams.”
Herod attributes some of the player drop-out to a new registration system introduced this year.
“Online registration started this year, which was a mandate by Rugby Canada,” says Herod. “But it didn’t allow clubs and players to work with their membership and say, ‘okay pay a little bit now, pay a little bit later, we’ll put you on like a payment plan’. It needed to be paid all up front.”
With a significant number of members in high school and university, the St. Albert Rugby Football Club used to be able to accommodate cash-strapped students, but the new online system doesn’t allow that flexibility.
“I do believe that might be the one main factor when it’s all said and done,” Herod says. “But that combined with our fields was not a good mix by any means.”
Despite having no local field this year, Herod says the club did everything else right.
“We hired a very qualified coach,” he says. “She’s phenomenal, she runs the academy, so we weren’t lacking anything there. The club itself is still up and running, the weight room is there, the bar is there. Those types of good things are there.”
Herod anticipates that the team reduction will be a one-time thing just for this year and the club will be back to three teams next season.
“We do predict that we will be back on track next year,” he says. “Our U17 is close to 40 players strong, in our U19 program we’re over 20 players strong and I know of returning players that will be coming back next year that just weren’t able to play this year.”
