News

Season’s greetings everyone!

I hope this news letter finds you all well and enjoying the season so far!

With the First Team continuing to adjust to Divison 1 with performances improving week on week; the Second Team delivering solid performances and building a team ethos for the future; the Youth Team again building foundations of the future Senior squad; and the Juniors, Minis and Mini-Minis continuing to attract fantastic numbers and showing excellent displays on the pitch, making the Mold Rugby Club family bigger and better, we have a club thats in a good and stable condition.

I want to take this time to bring you all up to speed with developments at the club, what’s happened, what’s happening and what’s coming in the future.

So lets start with some recent events...

A couple of weeks ago our Head Coach, Joe Jones, informed us with a heavy heart that he had taken an opportunity to move south and join the Scarlets and continue to develop his professional playing career. Everyone at the club wishes Joe all the best at Scarlets and we hope he gets the Senior Wales shirt he aims for and we thank him for his contribution over the last few years.

I'm pleased to say that Ollie Heald has stepped back in to take the reins until the end of the season. We all know that Ollie will give his all and we thank him and his family for their continued committment to the club.

The Main Pitch

As many of you know, we have made significant investments on our playing surfaces both at the clubhouse and the leadmills over the summer. As we continue to play home games at the Leadmills, I think it is appropriate that I let you know the current situation with our main pitch. We met with the WRU rep, Alan Lewis, last week to have the new main pitch inspected. The overall feedback is that we are on our way to having a excellent pitch, with comments such as the coverage is really good, the root length is good but could be a little longer, and the soil / sand is a good mixture. The temporary pond we have had installed in the bottom left of the pitch is exactly that, temporary, much to our surprise on digging a hole in the middle of it we found that 2 inches down the soil was bone dry and in good condition, the top 2 inches however have been severely compacted during the works. Alan has liaised with both ourselves and the contractor to have remedial works undertaken to break up the compacted ground – this work will be completed in the coming weeks.  As it stands we will remain off the pitch until January 2024 when we will have another inspection.

Floodlights

As we continue to work on the main pitch it is pertinent to let you know that we also installed trunking for floodlight cabling and we continue to source funding for the installation of floodlights around the main pitch.  The plan is to try and have these installed at the end of this season, however at present there continues to be a few moving parts and we’re not able to fix that as a target date. More to follow when we have an update.

Explanation of WRU funding process

At present, the structure for funding support from the WRU is very much tailored from the bottom up, meaning that as a club we must first have a top-quality playing surface, we then need to have floodlights, and only then can we start to look at all other facilites including changing rooms and clubhouse.  This is the reason for us developing the club in the structured way that we are. The pitch is substantially complete and hopefully well on our way to securing funding for, and installing, floodlights.  However, we need to be realistic and for our changing rooms and clubhouse to be redeveloped we could be looking at a 3-5 year plan. As Trustees we have a responsibilty to ensure that the club is in a healthy financial position and that we are able to field teams and fulfil fixtures, this has to be our priority but please rest assured that we are working very hard in the background to improve our home and as things drop into place we will happily share the plans/updates.

Future on the horizon

At the start of 2024 we hope to share some further developments that will benefit you as members and will make things a lot easier for everyone.  I don't want to spoil the surprise and Santa has asked me to keep quiet until the new year so keep an eye out for further details in January/February time.

Hope the Christmas Shopping is going well and you’re on Santa’s good list.

Christmas Wishes

The Trustees