Div 1
Colleagues and Mosman have teams in every grade bar 1st grade. Great achievement for both clubs.
Based on this i would be interested in some feedback from any Mosman insiders. You have two Shute Shield clubs (Norths and Manly) on your doorstep yet the club continually does well in terms of player numbers and quality. Is there anything special that the club does to attract players? Are they locals or is the club culture so strong that you attract players from further afield? I do accept that you are in a wealthy part of town and I'm sure work colleagues etc get dragged along for a game!
Just interested in how the club manages to drag in players and whether there are any associations with schools nearby such as SHORE. Mosman always have a strong colts team!
I play Mosman Colts and our squad (approx. 28 boys) is made up of about 20~ or so boys from Shore graduating class of 2012 (including myself).
I personally played 5ths at Shore, but most of the team was 1sts / 2nds and we've got a few GPS Reps.
They either played Shute Shieild Colts for a couple of years and decided the workload wasn't for them, or made that decision straight out of high school.
For us, Subbies isn't a geographical choice, but more of a lifestyle one. Less training, more beers etc.
So yeah, we're mainly locals, but the club culture has helped, and so has our location. Theres a navy base in Mosman, so we get a lot of Navy boys (and then subsequently lose them when they get deployed). We've had two Navy boys go through our colts team, and we currently still have one playing with us. There are more in Grade, and it was a similar story last year.
As for the culture, we had a bloke from Norway come to play Mosman Colts in his gap year (he's since gone up the East coast). Why? He wanted to play rugby in a rugby-playing nation (as Norway only has a handful of Grade teams) and his coach, who had done a similar trip and played for Mosman as a youth, recommended the club.
I couldn't be any happier with the state of the club and the guys I'm playing with. Unfortunately, as Pfitzy alluded to, this isn't the same everywhere.
We've absolutely flogged some teams that don't have the squad numbers / player quality that we do (we beat Petersham by 100+ before the game was called off early) and we've had several teams forfeit due to lack of numbers. We've even played 7s games against teams for the same reason (although it counted as a forfeit).
This became particularly bad during the Uni break, when even we couldn't field a team (despite having around 30 squad members at the time) as everyone, as all students who live with their parents do, buggered off to Europe.
In those five weeks we forfeited one game and had three teams forfeit to us.
So in summary, Mosman has a great culture for a number of reasons, and is blessed with a strong player base. This is due to the schools we attend, the dominant sports in the area, the Navy base, the culture etc etc.
This is replicated in Colleagues a little bit as well, with their Colts team being primarily made up of boys from Kings / Sydney University Colleges. We're mates with them outside of footy and that clash is always great.
Also, with Old Iggies, who's team is mainly made up of Joeys / Riverview boys from our Year Group.
It seems that the key to having a strong Colts colts is to have a GPS feeder school, or an associated residential College at a Sydney university somewhere. Unfortunately, this isn't something that be replicated at all clubs, and it isn't particularly healthy for the game.
But alas that is how it is.
/rant
