Club Focus: Richmond RFC

Limerick side Richmond RFC are certainly on the up after a few very productive years on and off the field.

The Canal Bank club, founded in 1928, returned to senior rugby last season to compete in Division 2B of the Ulster Bank League and last year also saw a first ever ladies team lining out for the club.

The club has shown incredible resilience to recover since the clubhouse was burnt down in 2002 with a terrible year capped off by relegation from senior rugby.

Off the field, a new clubhouse is weeks away from completion with the club members themselves building Richmond’s new home as Youth Officer Brian Hanley explains:

“It’s all being done voluntary by club members. Everyone within the club has helped out – plasterers, brick-layers and general gophers like myself pulling and dragging blocks!

“It’s all done voluntary and we’re hoping within the next five or six weeks that it will be up-and-running.”

A new gym has been built as part of the clubhouse structure and new IRFU Lights have also been installed.

Club President Patrick McNamara is thrilled that the club will have a home again. “You need a base where you can go to and people can find out about this, that and the other. We’re delighted that it’ll be up and running again,” said McNamara, who began playing with the club as a teenager in 1975.

“Everything is moving along nicely. The gym is already finished and kitted out. We had loads of people helping at the start. Then, with the upturn in the economy, people started getting jobs and things started to slow down a bit.

"But there’s a big push on now for the next four weeks and hopefully everyone will get down. And with the floodlights we’ll be able to play a couple of games in the evening as well on Friday nights which can be another day out in the clubhouse,” he added.

The season before last was a hugely successful one as the club won the junior league for the third time in four years and beat Clonakilty by three points in the promotion/relegation play-off to go back senior. That season also saw the second team win three trophies – the Gleeson league, Webb Cup and Munster Junior 2 Cup.

This year has seen further progress in the ladies’ section with the creation of the underage structure for girls aged between 7 and 12 with 15 Girls attending the first training session for the ‘Richmond Bunnies’ (right) last month.

The senior team have made a poor start to this season but McNamara is hopeful that the quality shown in last year’s eight-placed finish can shine through again.

“We held our own in the league last year and we were delighted with that.

“We’ve changed our coach this year and lost the first three games but it’s just a matter of getting back into it again. We have new, younger players coming in and it’s just a matter of getting them used to the way we’re playing.

“This year there have been retirements and people have moved on but we have a good underage structure coming up. Last year we went to Sligo with 20 players and only two of them hadn’t played for Richmond underage and that was extraordinary,” he added.

The quality is certainly coming through the underage system but the quantity in some age-groups has been too low to field sides, although clever improvisation has ensured the younger players stay involved.

Youth Officer Hanley expanded: “We have amalgamated with Presentation RFC at some age-groups because of the small numbers. We still have teams in all age-groups from U-18s down to U-8s. Especially in Limerick now, when young fellas go to the ‘A’ schools it causes us an awful lot of problems and (The Richmond Under-12s in action last season) we lose playing numbers so we had to amalgamate to keep everybody playing.

“At U-16s we have combined with St. Mary’s but this is the first year in quite a while that we’re actually able to get an U-18 team on the field ourselves.”

There has been no shortage of quality players that Richmond have produced with Seán Cronin currently enjoying success with Leinster and Ireland. Former players Alan Cotter and Ger Slattery have also represented Munster in recent seasons. (The League-winning Richmond Under-14s)