yakstorm
First Grade
- Messages
- 5,834
bowes said:
If you read what I wrote, I said "I do believe there were 120,000 participants under in RL in the UK in 2005 under what Sports England defines as a participant." Now as I defined a participant isn't just the traditional player who is signed up to a club and plays on a weekly basis for 10 - 20 weeks in a year, it can include a range of different programs and events, some within school where the individual may not play much more than a game of Sevens or Nines. A player can also be counted multiple times under the definition of a participant if they happen to fall under multiple areas of counting.
Anyway, lets do some quick internet searching and see what we can get:
BARLA - 45,000
Champions Schools (Boys) - 25,000
Champions Schools (Girls) - 3,000
BUSA - 2,400
College - 1,300
Other Student RL - 900
Rugby League Conference - 3,000
Womens - 4,000
ESRL - 32,000 (60,000 According to Sports England, so less Champions Schools)
CSRL - 2,000
Wales - ?
Scotland - ?
Now anyway, I don't work for the RFL, so I don't have access to all their figures, but up there I've found 118,000 participants by searching the internet for around half an hour and thats excluding players from competitions like Merit Leagues, and Junior and other Senior comps in the Mid-Lands, London and so on. Don't forget also there is possibly about 1,000 players or so between Super League, National League 1 & 2 play the Academy levels below them which can be added and as you can see it all adds up very quickly.
Throw in some work by the Development Officers, heck a simple one day Gala Day featuring 10 schools playing nines (so say 15 players each squad), would be an extra 150 participants that would be added in there outside of any of those areas above. Say 10 of those a held a year by each of the 20 development regions there is 30,000 there again who technical could be defined as participants.
Now sure there will be some double even triple ups there, with some players in 1 area counting under other areas, but as far as Sports England is concerned they are separate participants, all sports in England do this, its why you get scenarios where some sports in the UK have more participants in a particular area than there are actually people who qualify for that age group (netball is notorious for this).
So again yes I do believe there are 120,000 registered participants in the UK for Rugby League. How many of these do I believe are RL players in a traditional sense, possibly closer to 70-80K but as a sport we are expected to count participants the same way as every other sport, so its 120,000 then.
