West Park Leeds RUFC

Nine miles north of Leeds, just off the A660 to Otley, is an affluent village called Bramhope. Thousands fly overhead every week from Leeds-Bradford airport, heading to or from sunnier climes, rarely thinking what lies beneath. There’s nothing especially remarkable about this place of roughly 4,000 souls. Aside from the rugby that is. Specifically the local ladies rugby team, who have their sights set high, to be among the big guns of the Tyrells Premier 15s. 

Thanks to its most famous resident, former England head coach Stuart Lancaster, the Yorkshire village of Bramhope, surrounded by farmland yet situated just a few miles away from one of the north’s busiest airports, has had its own moment in the sun in recent times. Most notably, when the senior national team trained there, but it is West Park Leeds Ladies who intend to really put the place on the map.

Having dominated Championship-level women’s rugby, West Park now want to become part of the elite. To do so, they have had to apply to join the Tyrells Premier 15s and hope they satisfy the minimum standards entry criteria. Repeat success on the pitch is not enough, just ask Lichfield.

Broadly speaking, this means they need to employ suitably qualified coaching and medical staff and possess a robust and sustainable business plan that would cover the annual cost of going into the league estimated to be roughly around the six-figure mark. With the deadline of January 31st now passed, everyone involved in the bid faces an anxious wait to see if they will be one of the four teams invited to join the revised ten-team league starting in 2020/21. 

The emergence of women’s teams at Gallagher Premiership clubs Exeter – headed up by England big hitters Susie Appleby and Amy Garnett – Newcastle and Sale Sharks makes this task far from a formality especially with a lack of financial backing. A natural stone paving company, Well Stoned, may be the main shirt sponsors but more joint ventures are needed.

Also, West Park Leeds, which runs upwards of twenty teams across the senior men’s and women’s, juniors and vets sections, has Community Amateur Sports Club (CASC) status and jeopardising the financial support that comes with this, by having a professionally run team playing under their name at the ground, would “bankrupt the club within two to three years,” reckons Alan Simpson, the club’s president. 

So, if West Park Leeds Ladies do go up, they’ll have to compete against the likes of Harlequins and Loughborough Lightning under a different name, leasing The Sycamores – the club’s ground – as and when required, just as Yorkshire Carnegie, the Headingley-based men’s team have done in recent years.

“If we get Premiership status, we’d become a separate entity to West Park Leeds,” explains Adam Faulkner, head coach of West Park Leeds Ladies. “So even though we’ll have the link to West Park Leeds, we won’t be called that because of the CASC implications. In one sense, we can be called whatever we want, whether that’s Yorkshire Roses, Leeds Tykes Ladies. We’d have full-time staff – employing physios, doctors, analysts and so on.”

Faulkner, an academy scrum-half at Newcastle Falcons and former Leeds Tykes U21s player, has taken on the unenviable job of replacing Andy Clithero, the man who twice led West Park to victory in the National Cup as well as a National Championship title and two Championship North 1 titles.

Possibly one of the most successful yet unheralded women’s rugby coaches outside of this particular part of West Yorkshire, Clithero took the selfless decision to walk away from the coaching frontline last year, believing the time was right for a change of approach. 

“We realised that if we wanted to compete at a higher level, we needed to re-evaluate where we were, to enable us to move forward,” says Clithero, a coach at Leeds Beckett University.

“We decided it needed to change quite a lot – the coaching setup, the game plan etc, to make sure we were almost Premiership ready.

“It was a requirement to bring in Level 3 coaches, which we have done with Adam and Chris Stafford, and we’ve also brought in an S&C coach specifically for the ladies.

“It was a tough decision for me to step aside but I’ve been associated with this club a very long time and I only have its best interests at heart.

“I was going to be director of rugby but with me coaching them for so long, I’d still want to get involved, and there would be the danger of the girls getting mixed messages, so it made sense to have a clean break.”

Not that Clithero is totally detached from West Park, anything but. A relationship that has lasted the vast majority of his 43 years, firstly as a mini rugby player, does not come apart that easily.

He remains a keen supporter as well as one of the best-placed people to tell the story of West Park’s rise to glory.

It all began when Leos Ladies, the women’s section of local rivals Leodensians RUFC, who he once coached,  fluffed their lines, literally. “One weekend, we (Leos) were supposed to be playing Team Northumbria at home, but the pitch hadn’t been marked out. No-one had told us. Team Northumbria were about an hour away from Leeds when we found out. So I rang up West Park, who I was still involved with, and said, ‘is there any chance we could have a pitch?’ and they said, ‘of course’, and we redirected the Team Northumbria bus,” explains Clithero. “The facilities are brilliant at West Park whereas at Leos we were training on the bottom pitch where the lights didn’t work very well and there were no separate showers in the changing room. That prompted talk of us playing there on a permanent basis, and there was a secret vote of 30-3 in favour.”

The Leo Ladies team that had won the Northern Championship moved en masse to West Park in 2012/13, and the newly-formed team took their place in the league structure, albeit at a level below.

For Clithero, a ‘West Parker’ through and through, it was not a difficult switch, as he’d only been helping Leos out on the coaching front, but for some it was a more painstaking decision.

One of the three dissenting voices was Abby Whisker-Pollington, the 36-year-old tighthead prop who is “technically still on the books” at West Park, although with a little one now on the scene, she is edging ever closer towards retirement.

“It was difficult to leave, I was the only player to vote to stay,” she says. “I loved Leos, it was our little club but looking back the women and the men were very separate, and I loved it more because of the group of girls rather than the club itself.”

Clithero was insistent that no such divide would exist at West Park.

“We worked as a separate club at Leos and had to raise our own money and pay an amount to the club for use of the facilities, so when we went to West Park, I said I wanted to be on a level playing field with the men and insisted that we’d have the same rights,” he says.

“At first there was a lot of raised eyebrows, but it didn’t take long for it to sink in that this was a good side that could do well for the club. Quite quickly everyone was immersed in it.”

Demoted a level by the RFU because they had reformed under a new name, West Park swept all before them. “The level of rugby was beneath us, but we just had to get on with it,” says Whisker-Pollington, whose initial reluctance to leave Leos quickly subsided.

“I remember looking up at the clubhouse balcony during our first game and there were around 100 people standing there, and thinking ‘blimey’. That level of support continued throughout the entire season even though the standard was really poor, and we were winning 100-0 every week.

“You’d go into the bar after a game and the old men would talk to you, the lads would talk to you, and the chairman would buy you a pint, and I thought, ‘you know what, I like this place’.”

She liked it that much, her marriage to fellow prop, Jenni, was held there. “Jenn’s as hard as nails, she could have played for England,” claims Abby, in no way biased. 

Promoted back up to the Northern Championship at a canter (they only conceded twenty points in twelve games) with the bulk of the squad intact, West Park established themselves as Waterloo’s main rivals for the title.

“We’d always come second to Waterloo, and we needed to beat them, to show we were heading in the right direction,” says Clithero.

November 8, 2017 is a day he remembers well. “When we did beat them at their place (10-21), I think that was a turning point, it was a monkey off our back, because it showed we could compete at that level. 

“While they still won the league, we got to the Intermediate Cup Final that year, which was another big step forward.

“We beat Cheltenham in the semi and faced Hartpury-Gloucester in the final. They were taking players from all over and had a really strong side. 

“We were big underdogs. But they helped us out a lot by putting lots of stuff out on social media, showing highlights of their team. 

“We watched everything and said, right, we know exactly what your game-plan is. You’ve got a left wing who is absolutely electric, who we just need to shut down. We changed our defensive structure based on what we’d seen, and pretty much everything else, which was quite a ballsy move three weeks out from the game.

“I said if we wanted to become a better side, we needed to start beating better sides, and that meant developing what we do, and everyone bought into it.

Not everything went to plan, though. “The journey down to Royal Wootton Bassett was an absolute nightmare, it took about seven hours, there were roadworks and all sorts,” recalls Clithero. “I think we arrived at the hotel at about half past midnight and went straight to bed.”

Any qualms their then head coach might have had about his team performing on the day didn’t last long.

“It felt like a home game for them because they had loads of supporters there, but I had a good feeling from the moment we took our two kickers out in the warm-up and they couldn’t miss. Everybody looked so focused. We won against the odds (32-19). 

“When they got the trophy out, there was red and white ribbons on the trophy, and they had to take them off and put ours on. That was brilliant. The bus journey back was a lot more enjoyable I can tell you.”

Leeds United’s famous terrace anthem, Marching on Together, could have been written for them. “We had three to four seasons where the team was very similar, it didn’t change very much, so we were able to develop as a group,” explains Whisker-Pollington.

“In women’s rugby you rely a lot on Uni players and then they’ll leave because they are going home or have got a job somewhere else, but we had real stability which I think came to fruition in last two seasons.”

The following season (2017/18) the plan was to win the League. “Waterloo got a franchise for the Premiership, the season before it started, so we thought we’ve got a chance to win the League, at last,” says Clithero.

“But then Lichfield were cut from the Premiership and everyone thought they’d romp it. However, we won it, going through the season unbeaten.”

West Park then took on Essex outfit Thurrock in a North v South Championship play-off final to decide the national champions. They won 42-26. Another game. Another big scalp. Another step forward.

Current 1st XV captain Vicky Pinks recognises the importance of the win. “Up until we beat Thurrock there had been a lot of hype that the southern teams were better than those in the north, so it was nice to prove a point,” says the 5’2 centre. “They’d been in the Premiership at one point, but we had the upper hand straight from the kick-off.”

The Thurrock victory made up for the disappointment of falling just short in the Senior Cup semi-final against the mighty Harlequins the week before. They went the extra mile in losing that game 17-15 … literally so, in Clithero’s case.

“Bad snow caused the original game to be postponed and the rearranged date was on the weekend when I was on my mate’s stag do in Germany,” he says.

Determined to get back, Clithero pulled out all the stops. “I had three flights booked to come back for the game because they’d left three options open about where the game would be played, because of the likelihood of more bad weather. 

“One was at Harlequins’ home ground in Guildford, one midway up the country and one at our place so I had flights booked for London, Leeds and Manchester. 

“We went to see FC Cologne play and went out afterwards, and I got back to our hotel at 2am in the morning and had to be up at 5am to catch the flight.

“I was still hanging and don’t know how I got on the plane to be honest.

“I had to get an Uber from Heathrow to Guildford, and didn’t look at the receipt until a few days later! 

“I got there and there was just me in our technical area with a raging hangover but in theirs, they had six coaches including World Cup winner Gary Street and one of the assistants from Scotland.

“We should have won the game, we played really well, and really took it to them. A couple of missed kicks proved crucial.”

A nomination for Team of the Year followed at the end-of-season Crabbie’s National Rugby Awards, while the following year they went unbeaten again in winning the Northern Championship, conceding less than 100 points and scoring 849.

At this point, the desire to play the likes of Harlequins every weekend, not just in a one-off Cup game, really kicked in, prompting the Premiership application.

Another driver was the loss of key talent away from Yorkshire. While once West Park were able to keep their best players together, those with international ambitions were now being told they needed to be playing Premiership rugby to stand a chance with England. In that sense, they can sympathise with Carnegie, who nurtured the likes of Danny Care, a former West Park junior, before a ‘bigger’ club came calling.

West Park’s talent drain includes England Red Rose internationals Rachel Lund, Tatyana Heard, Zoe Aldcroft, while Lois Brown and Cara Cookland are two recent examples of young players having to branch out from the Sycamores in a bid to further their careers.

Brown and Cookland signed for Darlington Mowden Park Sharks for the 2019/20 season, and Faulkner, despite being from the north-east himself, would love to see them come home. “The disappointing thing is seeing these players having to move out of Yorkshire to play Premiership rugby, that’s another reason for us to have a Premiership club in the county whether it is us or someone else like Harrogate,” he says. “I don’t know how true it is, but there are rumours DMP may be struggling because of Newcastle Falcons getting a women’s side, and you’ve also got Waterloo merging with Sale apparently, and if that happens, geographically, the closest team to them will be Loughborough Lightning, so it’s crying out for a team in Yorkshire.”

Adding her voice to the debate, Pinks, a one-time student team-mate of reigning World Rugby Women’s Fifteens Player of the Year, Emily Scarratt, is adamant the Premiership landscape needs to include Yorkshire.

“I played a couple of seasons up at Darlington whilst I was at University so I kind of did a little bit of a stint there in the Premiership but to have a Yorkshire team in the Premiership would be amazing. If you look at the success that we’ve had with the Yorkshire county side at Twickenham (Yorkshire are two-time defending Gill Burns County Championship winners), to have a Prem team, it just needs to happen.”

For Whisker-Pollington, an England age-grade cricketer until a ruptured hamstring cruelly checked her progress, Premiership rugby is going to come too late.

“I’ll be 37 this year. Do I want to be smashed by Premiership players? No, I don’t. But do I want the club to be in the Premiership? 100 per cent, I do. 

“Personally I think it’s the right thing for West Park, with the way the club is set up and the girls we have here, we just need someone to back us financially.”

There was a time when West Park was seriously in the money – to the tune of £6million, just 13 years ago.

In June 2006, members of West Park Bramhope voted overwhelmingly to merge with Leeds RUFC – the amateur club formed by another merger, involving Headingley and Roundhay from which Leeds Tykes, now Yorkshire Carnegie, came to pass – and the club’s name changed to West Park Leeds. 

The realisation of funds from the sale of Chandos Avenue, Roundhay’s old home, then went to the club enabling major redevelopment work to go ahead at The Sycamores.

Out of the windfall a two-tier clubhouse was built, high specification floodlights were erected, three new adult and two new junior pitches were created, an old grass training area was converted to a full size 3G all-weather pitch and an advanced drainage system was installed.

The footprint of the site has now doubled in size from when the club first moved to Bramhope in 1970, which coincided with the first name change from West Park (formed in 1959, and named after a long-gone secondary school) to West Park Bramhope, to 42 acres.

No wonder former Leeds Carnegie head coach and England World Cup winner Neil Back once described the facilities at the Sycamores “as surely ranking amongst the finest in the country.”

Back was the head coach the last time Leeds had a team in the men’s Premiership. Given the current state of their finances and their position at the foot of the Greene King Championship, a return has never seemed further away.

By contrast, West Park Leeds are riding high at the top of their respective Championship under their new coaching regime as they chase a third successive title and have never been closer to reaching the Promised Land.

Story by Jon Newcombe

Pictures by John Ashton

This extract was taken from issue 9 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.