Saracens and Bath share Community ‘Club of the Year’ Title
On Wednesday, representatives from Bath Rugby, Saracens and Newcastle Falcons all came to Portcullis House at Parliament to give presentations on their community work in front of a panel of judges in order to determine which club should be Community ‘Club of the Year.’
This whole process started last week, when a panel of assessors shortlisted Bath, Saracens and Newcastle for Club of the year and also determined the winners of the Innovation and Impact Awards, two new awards this year for individual programmes clubs are running.
The assessors included representatives from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), Department of Health, Positive Futures, and the CSR Department of BT Wholesale. They reviewed materials that clubs submitted through Business in the Community’s Clubs that Count tracker.
They awarded Bristol Rugby with the Innovation Award (for an innovative new programme started in the past 12 months) for its Inferno Programme, which tackles social inclusion by teaching rugby (and life) skills to young offenders at HMP Ashfield. Bath Rugby and Sale Sharks were also highly commended for their Language Through Sport and School of Hard Knocks programmes respectively.
Newcastle Falcons won the Impact Award (for an established programme able to demonstrate the positive impact it’s making on its community) for its Touch Rugby programme, which gets 950 adults active each year (40% of which are female, 35% of which haven’t done any form of physical activity in past year). Bath Rugby was also highly commended for its Wilts / Sportsmatch Girls Rugby Programme.
And then for the main event this past Wednesday: Bath Rugby, Saracens and Newcastle Falcons all gave their presentations before the judging panel, which included Derek Wyatt, Paul Farrelly, and Andy Reed, MPs from the All-Party Parliamentary Rugby Group, as well as Louise Poole, Head of Sponsorship at EDF Energy, Tanja Rasmussen, Community Investment Campaign Director, and Mark McCafferty, Chief Executive of Premier Rugby.
The judges were impressed by the scale and scope of the community work they saw, and by the partnerships and investments the clubs have been making in their communities. In the end they awarded the ‘Club of the Year’ award to both Saracens and Bath Rugby—Saracens for their sheer professionalism and the way their community foundation that has continued to grow and innovate, and Bath for how far they’ve come in such a short time period and the way they put community work into the ethos of the club.
All the awards were presented at an evening reception at the House of Commons.
From left: Gordon Banks and Hannah Pirnie from Saracens, Louise Poole from EDF Energy, Jimmy Deane from Bath Rugby
Up next on the blog I’ll be posting the Powerpoint presentations from the finalists and video of the judges so you can hear what they thought in their own words.
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About Professional Rugby in the Community
I'm Wayne Morris, Community Manager for Premier Rugby. This blog is a place for me and the Community Development Officers from around the Guinness Premiership to share the community work our clubs are doing and talk about some of the issues we're trying to solve through sport.
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