Last Monday saw Selby RUFC launch its Junior Player Development Programme (JPDP) with players from our current 13s, 14s, 15s and 16s participating in intense, but enjoyable, training sessions delivered by the Club Rugby Development Officer Richard Nicholson, Director of Rugby, Mark Pearson, Senior Rugby Lead Coach Jacob Robinson, 18s Lead Coach James Hunt and Senior Physiotherapist Hayley Brady.

The programme is brand new, completely in house and invite only with initial nominations for participants coming from the age grade lead coaches. However, we are expecting to run a revolving door policy with other players being invited if they demonstrate technical and tactical, athletic or game understanding improvements within their weekly age group sessions. Likewise, those starting on the programme will need to keep up the excellent standards they showed on Monday evening to ensure they keep their places!

The Programme was initiated to give some of our junior players an extra session of rugby training along with educational sessions on subjects like nutrition, injury prevention, strength and conditioning and mindset which are planned as soon as the current situation allows us to meet indoors.

These sessions will run monthly and we will also be inviting officers of the newly formed Yorkshire Rugby Academy to come along and observe our players to give them an opportunity to see some of the talent we have coming through our junior section.

We will be extending the programme to include the u13 and u15 girls as soon as we can put resources in place.

Many thanks to Steve Tosney for attending with his camera and taking some photos of our first session.