Which may then be one of the biggest problems in young player development.



If the top clubs in Hull stock pile the best players then I assume most of their league games are non events?



Does winning most weeks by 50 plus points help develop the players? It will certainly help develop a young kids ego when he keeps scoring 5 or 6 tries a game against 'lesser' opposition but what happens when his team come up against a West Yorkshire side who have players of his same level who are able to defend well and ask questions in attack? I am sure some players rise to the challenge but maybe the lack of an intense week on week league competition breeds a soft underbelly with certain players?



Is it the same in the West Riding and Lancashire, do they have a small number of dominant teams or is the talent more equally spread therefore creating a more intense competition?

For open age it should be about winning - these are independent amateur clubs. If you want feeder clubs for young pros, you need semi-independent pro clubs. For younger players I agree, it should be about developing and having fun.

Rovers signed 9 players to '1st pro deals' earlier in the year - 2 from East Hull, but 3 from Holderness Vikings and 4 from West Yorkshire, so maybe things are changing.



Off on a bit of a tangent, I read an interview with Jodie Broughton and Ben Jones-Bishop, who were at Queens together when they were 14. Chucked out of their League for building a super team, apparently, they played in the East Riding League for a bit, which they described as 'a bit poor'. They had to move to the Lancashire league to get some competition. Not that surprising - W. Yorks and Lancs are much more populous. But when you see the best young players at Hull and Rovers are probably T. Briscoe and Watts respectively, then the value in looking beyond Hull (as well, not instead of!) is clear to see.

Rocky has left for Wigan.

who is taking over from crooks and harman??? hope it's someone a bit younger,along the Webster type of coach??someone to encourage them instead of hurling abuse at them might help(i saw and heard crooks do this a cpl of times at west hull when the academy played there last season).just thought the kids were a bit nervy of him at times.

Crooks and Harman



Damn, we got none left now then

Mel is still doing it until the New Year.

So how do we make the East Riding competition stronger?

Queens ARLFC have been chucked out of a number of competitions but that's the first time I've heard it was because they were too good.

Tough question. My point really was just that Hull and East Yorks is a shallower well to draw from than the places that say 'ginnel' instead of 'tenfoot'. It only has to support 2 SL clubs, but being smaller might tend to be more cyclic - maybe just that year was a bit poor. And Queens had, according to the interview in RLW, been considered too strong for West Yorks.



I'm very far from an expert, but at that age, I don't think it is about raising the intensity of competition, just trying to get kids to develop with good coaching and letting them have fun.



My suspicion is that we're just seeing a bit of batch to batch variation, rather than a systemic problem. Not every local generation can be golden, but by looking further afield Hull and Rovers can hopefully balance that out.



You look at the successful teams of recent years (including Hull in the middle of the decade) and there was always base of good homegrown players in the team. I know Rovers get stick for bringing in antipodeans, but in the short term the alternative hasn't been loads of good local youngsters as we were starting from scratch and the Smokey doctrine of losing nearly every week for 3 years would have been suicidal. To take another step we need, for example, for Scott Taylor to come on like Liam Watts has, for Sheriff, Cox and Bell to then follow him. They might or might not, but we'll only be serious and regular contenders once we get a generation that do.

I have seen this first hand I lost count of how many players at any level were happy just wearing a West Hull(Other teams are available) Tracksuit even though they got nowhere near the pitch.

I personally think its down to coaching at FC & Rovers. If you look at youth teams such as west hull etc that near enough always have some youth teams in yorkshire and national cup finals. At west Hull the u14's and u16's both got the national cup finals last season. I also think u13's got to yorkshire cup final and the u16's won the competition. Im pretty sure other clubs in the hull area have been successful against outer town teams but when they get beyond 16 when they get signed up professionally they are nowhere to be seen. What does that tell you then???

some kids develop faster than others, some get signed at 16 and never make it and leave the game,the hull area is very strong after U16 ,at U18 level with myton warriors and west hull the best 2 sides in yorkshire same at U17 cottingham tigers and west hull and some of these players may come though to academy level this year . Hull look to be improving coaching at scholarship and changing staff at academy level so we should see if its the coaching or maybe just not enough quality about. But having watched alot of games at these levels all over the youth game i havent seen better players at other clubs nationally , but they seem to get players coming though