THE Rugby Football Union wants to build on the rapid expansion of the game by creating a new adult team in every club over the next eight years. The number of players of all ages in the RFU�s 1,200 leading clubs increased by nearly 40 per cent in the five years after England�s Rugby World Cup victory in 2003.

Rugby union can also claim to be the fastest growing major sport in the country in terms of the increase in adult participation in the two years to October 2008.

�Rugby has never had a higher profile and we�ve been able to build on the explosion of interest in the game with strategies that have helped turn that interest into thousands of new players of all ages,� said the RFU�s Community Rugby Director Andrew Scoular.

� �The two years after 2003 saw a massive boom in the youth game and we were then able to accelerate the number of adults returning to rugby by recruiting more than 9,000 of them through our Go Play Rugby campaign in 2007.

� �We�re now specifically targeting the 16-24 age group, where so many sports lose players, with Play On. �We are creating new playing opportunities and putting 1,400 O2 Pathfinders in place to make sure we retain young people in the game as they move from school into further education and into employment.

� �Over the next two years we want make sure the human and physical infrastructure � the volunteers, coaches and referees as well as the quality of the facilities � is in place to sustain continued growth. �If we can do that we�ll be equipped to reach the goal we have set ourselves of adding the equivalent of a new team to every one of our clubs over the next eight years. �It�s a challenging target but one we can reach with the continued support of the fantastic volunteers in our clubs and Constituent Bodies.�

Achieving that would add around 1,200 adult teams, taking the total number above 5,300 during the eight years of the RFU Third Strategic Plan, which runs from 2008/09 to 2015/16.

Among the programmes identified to sustain the growth of the game are:

� A national People and Places campaign to run over the next two seasons in the build-up to Rugby World Cup 2011.

� Expansion of the O2 Pathfinder network to connect players with new opportunities. More than 1000 Pathfinders have been put in place at schools, colleges, universities and clubs this season and 464 more college and university teams created.

� Provide a leisure rugby programme that keeps new and existing players engaged throughout the close-season in Tag, Touch, Sevens and Beach rugby. This year the centrepiece will again be high-profile O2 Scrum on the Beach events.

� A focus on recruiting and retaining more front row players at all ages, building on the success of projects like Prop Idol trialled over the last two years.

� Piloting a licensing scheme and producing a new suite of coaching courses to continue developing 36,000 existing qualified coaches. More than 14,000 have taken part in coach development activity this season.

� Expanding the referee trainer workforce to enable the RFU to provide high-quality support to our 37,000 qualified officials, which includes piloting new junior refereeing awards.

� Continuing to train, support and expand our 57,000 volunteer workforce and to focus on the 16-24 age group through initiatives like vRugby.

� Continued commitment to the Community Rugby Coach scheme. The RFU�s 157 full and part-time CRCs have delivered Yazoo Tag Rugby programmes to more than a million children in the last two years and engaged 54,000 more in this season�s HSBC Rugby Festivals for Emerging Schools

The RFU�s own figures show the game grew by 38.1 per cent in its 1,200 Section One� clubs (it has 1,900 member clubs in total) in the year to July 2008. A snapshot taken on May 1 shows another notable increase with the number of adult players recorded as 114,000, youth players (13-18) at 124,070 and mini rugby players (U13) at 95,888.

Those trends were reflected in the Sport England Active People 2 Survey (APSI 2) at the end of last year.

Researchers found that the number of over 16s taking part in rugby for at least 30 minutes a week had grown from 185,600 to 230,300 in the two years to October 2008.

The increase of 24.1 per cent was the largest recorded by any major sport with more than 60,000 regular adult participants at the start of the Active People survey process.

Total participation in the RFU�s member clubs, affiliated and unaffiliated schools, higher and further education, leisure rugby and the Armed Forces � in all forms of the game including Sevens, Tag and Touch Rugby � now stands at around 2.25 million.

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