Wigan Warriors Community Foundation visit Leyland Warriors with development sessions detailed

Boys and girls under the age of 13 had the opportunity to learn from the Community Foundation’s coaching staff at a training session held at Leyland Warriors’ home ground.

The development session was part of the Warriors’ ongoing efforts to build community engagement and provide more young people with the opportunity to get involved with rugby league. The session included training drills, skill-building exercises and fun activities designed to enhance the young players’ abilities and feed their passion for rugby league and strive for excellence.

“We are incredibly grateful to Wigan Warriors for taking the time to visit us and work with our junior teams,” said Ken Broadfield, chair of Leyland Warriors.

“Their dedication to promoting rugby league and engaging with the community is truly commendable. This event has provided our young players with invaluable experience and inspiration, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Wigan Warriors.”

Scott Rafferty, assistant head of community with Wigan Warriors Community Foundation, has provided an insight into the programmes they deliver to community clubs like Leyland Warriors.

“In Wigan, we deliver a range of programmes, working with nurseries, primary schools and high schools, delivering a range of sports,” said Rafferty. “High school is predominantly rugby, primary school is kind of your national curriculum, and we also have a mental health officer, who works with children all the way up to adults, and that’s the same with our wellbeing and disability inclusion officers.

“When we go outside of Wigan, it is predominantly rugby. The programme that was delivered at Leyland was through the Lancashire development plan that we’ve got, so we’re basically trying to grow the game outside of Wigan.

“We’re visiting seven different community clubs, Leyland is one, there are two in Blackpool, just around providing support to that club in the best way we can. For example, if a club has a junior section but they might not have a team at a certain age group, we might go into the local schools, deliver rugby in the schools with that specific age group and then invite them down to that community club.

“We’re linked with the community club, we’ll go and do a session there like we did last week at Leyland, deliver a programme around their needs and wants. They might say ‘we need an Under-11s’ so then we know on the back of that session, we can go to all the schools in Leyland, Chorley or anywhere we can kind of reach, will provide six weeks worth of rugby for free, funded through the RFL, and then we’ll leaflet and flyer for the local clubs.

“What we’ve done in the past is a festival down at Leyland, inviting the schools, so they get familiar with the site they are going to go to, and then hopefully we can get them into the local community club.”

Wigan Warriors Community Foundation are taking their ‘May Madness Camp’ on the road to four locations during the half-term break. Camps will be held at Heysham Atoms on Tuesday 27, Blackpool Scorpions on Wednesday 28, Egremont Rangers on Thursday 29, and West Lancashire on Friday 30 May. Camp will take place between 10am-2pm each day, with individuals aged 5-16 welcome to attend. For more details, click HERE.