Chapter 21. The scene today

Nowadays, amateur or community rugby league, like most other team sports, is in decline once more, with clubs being lost. The biggest casualty locally has been Ovenden. Situated in a Rugby League stronghold, they had lots going for them – a regular pitch in its best state, a clubhouse, Jake Connor coaching. They were still producing future stars, not least Jake himself, and had won both the Pennine League and the Pennine Presidents Cup Final as recently as 2018. But the clubhouse became the subject of break-ins through the roof and vandalism increased. Coupled with Rugby League’s regular problem of a lack of volunteers to take on the administrative work, the club had ceased to operate in 2021, by which time they were in the Yorkshire Men’s League Division 1.

Halifax Irish also perished. They had joined with big rivals Ovenden to play at Four Fields in 2015 when both clubs were struggling for players, so effectively finished at the same time. Todmorden, who had reformed in 2020 after a nineteen year absence and played at Woodhouse, also folded once more. The Pennine League has become but a shell of its former glories, with just Stainland Stags remaining as Halifax members in 2024. Some have left for the Yorkshire Men’s League, but others have folded. Most of the new teams established during the league’s earlier years have now gone.

The other major clubs – those with their own clubhouses and ground – still survive, like the Rugby Union clubs in a similar position. Siddal, King Cross Park, Illingworth, Brighouse Rangers, Greetland and Elland all now have excellent facilities. They all survived the Covid pandemic, which caused the cancellation of the 2020 season, intact, though by 2024 Greetland and Elland fielded a joint team in the Yorkshire Men’s League. Some now have Women’s teams and Masters teams (for men aged over 35 and women over 30) as the game expands in other directions, and most have a solid junior structure, with teams in the many different age-group sections of the Yorkshire Junior League helping fill the gap left by the reduction of schools rugby.

However, schools teams do still play, very successfully in the case of Brooksbank School in Elland, who have used their sports college status and the coaching of P.E. teachers Damian Ball and Tim Webster to produce some of the best teams in the whole country in the years after 2009. Various year groups, both boys and girls, have won Champion Schools national titles, one of them featuring such as Kruise Leeming, Chester Butler and Nick Rawsthorne, another with Morgan Smithies, Amir Bourouh and Riley Dean. Their Year 7s qualified for the Wembley Cup Final curtain-raiser in 2011, as had a Halifax Schoolboy representative team twenty years earlier.

Halifax’s 1895 Cup Wembley winners included three former Brooksbank students in Ben Kavanagh, Jacob Fairbank and Will Calcott, while the women’s final earlier that afternoon included Amy Hardcastle (Leeds) and Phoebe Hook (St Helens). Others in the Halifax squad with local connections were Zack McComb, James Saltonstall, Adam O’Brien, Tom Inman and Dan Fleming.